Three Days Grace

It never ceases to amaze me how a band can release one good rock anthem, surround it with pedestrian offerings and call it a record. Is it a push backwards to the original single driven music industry of the ’50s and ’60s? Is it our millennial 30-second commercial mentality? Three Days Grace is a band that couldn’t build on the foundations of their one good track and would have been better served with a two-song single. Their rock anthem is the heavily pushed and promoted "I Hate Everything About You,” co-penned and produced by Big Sugar’s Gavin Brown. The track, short and repetitive with its message of loving to hate and hating to love someone, was ripped from the Avril Lavigne handbook of rage pop. Angsty vocalist Adam Gontier puts his whole emotional self in the few but mighty lyrics making the track a scream-along summer song. Unfortunately, the trio’s formula fails beyond the lead single. The remainder of the disc is dime-a-dozen Toronto bar rock. They say it best themselves on the disc’s closing track "Overrated.” The lyrics read "You made it, you played it. Your shit is overrated.” That is exactly how I feel about this record.