Guess what: Millennials are now elders too!
[Video]
[7.14]
Julian Axelrod: Branding is so powerful. “Poppy with Evanescence and Spiritbox”: Exciting! Mysterious! Sounds like a group of helpful sprites you’d meet in a fantasy game! “Poppy with Amy Lee and Courtney LaPlante”: The guest list of the worst Zoom call you’ve ever been on in your life.
[5]
Claire Davidson: Part of me wants to like “End of You” on principle alone, if for no other reason that the fact that it brings together three female metal performers in a genre routinely associated with masculinity. As the song proves, though, assembling a coterie of artists based solely on their gender doesn’t guarantee a strong or coherent track. Amy Lee is credited as the primary artist here, and her more operatic delivery makes a hard act for Poppy, whose best asset is her cryptic blankness, to follow. Adding to that whiplash is Courtney LaPlante, who follows Poppy’s more delicate underplaying with full-bodied, rabid screams—not necessarily a poor choice, but one unsupported by the preceding instrumentation, which doesn’t build the requisite tension after the chorus to make her more visceral rage sound intuitive. About that sonic palette, too: as ominous as “End of You” strives to be, describing the personal liberation its narrators find after leaving a toxic relationship, the song’s lack of a strong melody leaves it floundering, its three central voices left without an anchor to ground their passion.
[5]
Iain Mew: Doing “I Feed You My Love” and adding Actual Amy Lee is such a win that the variable hit-rate of the growlier bits barely matters.
[8]
Nortey Dowuona: Amy Lee begins the song with a gentle tone, which then hardens as she approaches the chorus; later, Courtney LaPlante’s gravelly howl rips through the structure and leads into a disorienting, yet groovy breakdown which allows both women to soar. Between these two powerhouses, and the intensity of the drums and bass interlocking, Poppy doesn’t get much time on the mic. Despite that, it never feels like she’s riding their coattails, but rather connecting them both. Courtney and Amy’s approaches could have clashed immediately: Courtney softening back into a croon and Amy ascending to the top of her range could have landed poorly, a weak assertion of community. But with Poppy as the strong, cooling tone between their extremes, the two can soar above, knowing there is a home base to return to. (It is a bit telling that they all sing “the end of life for you is the start of life for me,” but Poppy interpreted it as a mealymouthed platitude while Amy interpreted it as a feminist credo.)
[10]
Ian Mathers: I actually want this to be twice as long so that all three of them have more time to sing and/or scream. Admittedly I am a sucker for this kind of compressed and polished-to-a-sheen capital-M Metal, but I also feared this might be too many cooks, and gee whizz it is not.
[8]
Katherine St. Asaph: I’m sure this will hit differently for everyone else, but for me it’s like splashing around in other people’s nostalgia pool, aware the whole time I’m trespassing.
[6]
Tim de Reuse: The best nostalgia doesn’t just sound like the point of reference but sounds like what it felt like to listen to the point of reference back in the day. Here, this is accomplished with a mix so exuberant and a composition so overstuffed with ideas that the impact hits you in your teenage brainstem before your adult self is able to realize you’re listening to Evanescence.
[8]
Forget K-Pop, this is the only girl group I need. [8]