Daughtry - A Disgraceful, Bland, White Bread Excuse For Music

Chris Daughtry is proof that anyone can sell anything with corporate $$ pushing, promoting, and buying airwaves and other forms of media. After listening to this piece of plastic called "Leave This Town", (I'd never actually buy this thing, God forbid), I can think of thousands of better songwriters, musicians and performers who sell far less - not because of an inferior product, but because of a lack of promotion. It's formulaic warm milk, a mass produced product, much like a Big Mac, geared for mass consumption without a shread of individuality or uniqueness - nothing you won't forget in short order. It's *disposable goods* at it finest. It's as bland as it gets. Save you money folks.

Here's just a sampling of the lousy reviews this terrible CD is getting. What a disgrace to true music lovers.

"Practiced, perhaps overly-practiced, is a good way to describe the soullessly glossy song."

"Leave This Town is only “rock” because of Daughtry’s jeans, silly facial hair and the fact that he had a more rocker-like persona than Idol co-stars Taylor Hicks and Katherine McPhee. (Seriously, shaved head and carefully sculpted beard-thing? Enough, already.)"

"There’s nothing about this mid-tempo pop that differentiates it from anything being produced by Katy Perry or the Jonas Brothers or any other pop star on the radio right now. In addition to the Nickelback track, the songs were co-written with members of the Click Five, Three Days Grace, Lifehouse and Evanescence/We Are the Fallen, guaranteeing the album a professionally-crafted pop-rock sound that sounds like it was written in a boardroom rather than a motel room or tour bus."

- Music Vixen, 2/5 stars
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"Daughtry rips off Nickelback, Evanescence, Lifehouse ..."

"Maybe it's a result of Daughtry's "Idol" training, which favored imitation over innovation, but it's hard to think of another act with such fidelity to the fist-pumping, power-chord-flogging rock star ideal. Daughtry isn't trying to be another Eddie Vedder, which would indeed have required authenticity beyond his reach. He's an imitator of the imitators, Vedder twice removed."

"Leave This Town" single-mindedly adheres to almost every post-grunge cliche, even the bad ones: the constant loud-soft repetition (an ominously quiet first verse followed by a louder chorus, usually with layered backing vocals), the peevishness, the growling."

"Every song, with few exceptions, represents the entire album in miniature -- if you've heard the first two tracks, you've heard the whole thing. "Leave This Town" is an example of the broadest possible formulas being put to their least imaginative uses."
- Washington Post
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"There's no way around it: Daughtry's new album is dumb."

"It's a collection packed full of groaning cliches and calculated banality, and while that's not so different from plenty of music in any era, "Leave This Town" is so formulaic it could have come from a laboratory at DuPont. Where they make plastic."

"Unfortunately, his dream sounds an awful lot like a compilation of outtakes from all the bands whose influence -- and, not incidentally, commercial successes -- loom large on this record: Creed, Staind, Nickelback, 3 Doors Down. Trouble is, there's nothing interesting about questing for fame and fortune by repeating what others have already done, and the only thing worse than playing dumb is being boring."
- Courant.Com
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"Did you find Nickelback to be a little too underground and substantial with too much diversity? Your dreams are about to come true."

"Having sold 5,000,000 copies of their début album, we have on our hands the sophomore album, sure to sell less now they've stopped restocking Guantánamo. You should know the drill from us using the N-word, it's gut-wrenching nausea provided by ugly Americans with bad facial hair. Popstars may have given us Girls Aloud, but that's not remotely enough to excuse the travesty of the knock-on effect we have to endure."

"Yes, we have ourselves another American Idol Deadbeat Semi-finalist. Surely the point of these competitions is to reward the winner, not give everyone who finishes a record contract. It's the music industry, not sports day at the special school. Perhaps a new contract might be in order banning any who do not win from ever singing again. Scratch that, probably cheaper just to shoot them in the face."

Chris Daughtry is a special kind of hell though, every single song goes exactly the same way. Dire introduction, dodgy southern-tinged verses conveying appalling lyrics (stay tuned for examples), then the drummer pounds the snare and toms together eight times and we're at the chorus, wherein the vocals start to emulate the various faces from a laxative advertisement and the melodrama reaches levels not seen since the last time a TV movie aired entitled "My Daddy Didn't Love Me On Tuesdays: The Jessica Simpson Story"."
- Strange Glue
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"The result: melodic hard rock that doesn't always rock that hard."

"The band's second album and first recorded with drummer Joey Barnes, bassist Josh Paul and guitarists Josh Steely and Brian Craddock, all of whom signed on after singer Chris Daughtry finished cutting his debut — does little to answer that question. In fact, it mostly muddies the waters.
- USA Today, 2 1/2/4 stars.
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"Too bad this is disappointingly generic hard rock with virtually the same formula that made his debut such a success."

"There are songs about sweating out tough times, learning hard truths, standing strong by his lover, searching for things to believe in . . . how many clichés did we leave out?"
- Boston.Com