Sanctuary

The Roast

“Twenty-three years after Fallen, Amy Lee remains the only person alive who can make a choir, a string section, and a downtuned guitar sound like a personality instead of a budget line. Sanctuary, the first Evanescence record in five years, splits custody between Nick Raskulinecz and Jordan Fish, and you can hear the seams. Half the album is classic cathedral metal, the other half wears the glossy synth metalcore coat Fish already tailored for Poppy and Bring Me The Horizon. It works more often than it should, which is annoying to admit. Lee's voice is still an unfair advantage, soaring over breakdowns like she is grading them, and the colder electronics give her gothic theater a sharper frame than anything since the mid 2000s. The catch is that the genre she invented has been strip mined by two decades of imitators, so when Sanctuary leans on the old grandeur it occasionally sounds like Evanescence covering an Evanescence tribute act. A few choruses still chase a rock radio format that no longer exists, polished for a programmer who retired years ago. And yet, in a year of beige playlist rock, an album this theatrically committed feels almost radical. Nobody else does this at this scale, mostly because nobody else can, and Lee clearly knows it.”

The Bright Side

Amy Lee's voice, obviously, but specifically what the Jordan Fish productions do with it. The synth layers and metalcore weight give her something modern to soar against, and the heaviest moments on Sanctuary are genuinely heavy rather than decoratively loud. The orchestral swells feel earned, the themes of confronting darkness instead of fleeing it land with real conviction, and the whole record sounds like a band that still wants something after twenty-three years. That hunger is rarer than talent, and Sanctuary has both.

Hardest Sneer

“The best Evanescence album in years, which is also a polite way of saying the bar spent a decade lying on the floor. Amy Lee invented this sound in 2003, and the most damning thing about her imitators is that she still does it better half asleep.”

Issues (3)