Chris Daughtry's Newest Album Gets Blasted By the Miami Herald!

I never really liked Howard Cohen of the Miami Herald, but I have to give credit where it's due! He hits the bullseye with this scathing yet truthful review of Chris Daughtry and his other Tools newest album. So bad, in fact, that it only received 1 1/2 stars. Major Ouch! Enjoy!


Reviews | Daughtry
• ROCK
DAUGHTRY
Leave This Town
19/RCA
* ½
American Idol finalist Chris Daughtry never met a cliché he couldn't steamroll his way over on angst-driven post-grunge rock. That was forgivable on his band's 2006 debut because you figured he probably didn't have that much say in its direction.

However, this baggage is damnable on Leave This Town, the sound-alike follow-up to the quadruple-platinum Daughtry.

Leave This Town is maddeningly generic and predictable. Hey, big dumb rock doesn't have to strive for Art. Chickenfoot's no-frills retro rawk, for instance, is a blast to crank while you try to drive 55.

Not so Daughtry's sullen rockers. The lyrics are little more than nonsensical, unrelated lines strung together so he can sing in rhythm. ``With time to kill and an empty tomb / I always find the way to pass the time with you,'' he yowls on the muscular You Don't Belong.

If the brooding music was occasionally fun and distinctly crafted, this would matter little. But Daughtry, who sings well but sounds as if he hasn't listened to any rock band pre-2003, merely apes Creed and Nickelback, whose leader Chad Kroeger cowrites two tracks, including the first single, No Surprise, an apt alternate title for this disc.

Daughtry's faceless group isn't well served by returning producer Howard Benson's glossy but tightly compressed sound. Guitarists Josh Steely and Brian Craddock are mixed into flat bread when ear-grabbing solos should offer dynamics on otherwise catchy cuts like Ghost of Me, the CD's best. Country's smooth crooner Vince Gill guests on Tennessee Line but is similarly rendered ineffectual.

-- HOWARD COHEN

Daughtry: Slant Magazine HATES Your New Album!

Being known as one of the official "Baldie Haters" in Taylorland, I might as well live up to my reputation and post this 1/5 star rated review from Slant Magazine for Daughtry's lame new album. They gave it 1/5 star rating. Heh! I'm glad to see people seeing and understanding the poser and tool for what he really is. Enjoy!

With Chris Daughtry's first album, the inexplicably caps-locked DAUGHTRY, authenticity was the question du jour: Could an American Idol also-ran, one uninspiring enough to be bested by twitchy soul man Taylor Hicks, front a genuine-article rock band? If you'll take your answer in the form of a Billboard chart, DAUGHTRY was a coup for the not-quite-Idol. While sounding indistinguishable from faceless radio rockers like Staind, Hoobastank, and Fuel, Daughtry has outsold its obvious influences by massive margins, their debut's quintuple-platinum certification a glittery mathematical reminder that the band's act has caught on in an era when rock bands rarely do. When so many hot young bands are releasing albums that are more blogged about than bought, Daughtry sells albums like the biggest rock band in the world.

Perhaps aware of their seismic crossover appeal, Daughtry opens their sophomore effort, Leave This Town, with all systems set to "anthemic," and, with the exception of a couple of acoustic ballads, they stay in that mode for the entirety of the album. Chris attempts to make every song a Big Statement, intoning dead-serious verses while the band gathers momentum behind him, inevitably culminating in a soaring chorus which, as a rule, will be repeated four times before the song ends. Brazenly—almost aggressively—artless in their approach to songcraft, Daughtry will surely draw its defenders from the "turn off your brain and have fun" camp, but Leave This Town is manifestly not a "fun" album. Daughtry's arena-scale ambitions can, apparently, only be fulfilled by rock of the most emotionally expressive variety, yielding lots of grim-faced confessions, clumsy attempts at introspection, and choruses drenched in its namesake's tortured howl.

What the band proves is that expressing emotion and evoking it are fundamentally two different crafts. To ensure that every mook in the stadium can pump his or her fist along, Chris employs blandly general lyrics, divorced from any of the particularistic observation or reflection that generates real emotional heft. On the opening track, "You Don't Belong," Daughtry sings what isn't so much a verse as a collection of unrelated statements that happen to appear in the same minute of a song: "No, you don't belong to me, I think you lied to me/And with my back against this wall, it's hard to be strong/No, you'd tell me anything, look what you've done to me/Still, I tell myself that tomorrow you'll be long gone." Significantly, it's the only song Chris penned on his own.

The co-writing credits for the 11 songs that follow read like a who's-who of lowest-common-denominator radio-rock, with luminaries from such risible acts as Nickelback, Three Days Grace, and Lifehouse contributing. It seems absurd to say that someone like Chad Kroeger or Ben Moody has a distinctive lyrical voice, but compared to Chris's general-to-the-point-of-meaningless confessions, Kroeger's tough-guy breakup drama ("No Surprise") and Moody's tears-and-roses gothica ("Open Up Your Eyes") seem rich. That doesn't mean the songs are better; in fact, Moody may deserve an award for contributing what, on an album as straining as Leave This Town, is the worst song by a fairly large margin. "Open Up Your Eyes" is embarrassingly overwrought, with Chris yowling clichés ("Welcome to the first day of your life/Just open up your eyes") between verses about grieving and the afterlife.

That the material on Leave This Town is clearly so meaningful to Chris makes the experience worse: The songs end up being turgid in spite of what appears to be a substantial emotional investment on the performer's part. It might all be easier to take if the band were simply mercenary about performing bad songs for giant heaps of money, but again, it all comes back to authenticity. Chris Daughtry has a real band that plays really serious songs, which are, almost without exception, really, really bad.

Daughtry's Album "Leave This Town" Predicted to FLOP in First Week!

I could NOT be happier. Why? Well, according to Hits Daily Double, this TOOL is predicted to undersell BIG TIME (240K-260K vs. 304K the first time around), despite the payola, ass licking, buying and pushing good 'ol fossil Clive Davis spent on his first CD. I thought for sure he'd sell at least as much as Carrie Underwood's 2nd album in her first week(in the mid 500K range) since both of their first albums did so well. In Daughtry's case, no thanks to any visible talent. Apparently, America is finally waking up to the arrogance of this no talent. He'll soon be selling his useless plastic out of his trunk. Here's hoping for a fast and speedy demise!

It's just a matter of time before we hear the words "Daughtry Who"?

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
________________________________________________

"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
____________________________________________________

"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
_______________________________________________

"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
______________________________________________

"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.
______________________________________________

"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