Running Out of Time : Three Days Grace

Band : Three Days Grace

Album : One X

Record: Jive

Track Listing:

1. It's All Over

2. Pain

3. Animal I Have Become

4. Never Too Late

5. On My Own

6. Riot

7. Get Out Alive

8. Let It Die

9. Over And Over

10. Time Of Dying

11. Gone Forever

12. One-X

There is much at stake for new bands regarding the release of sophomore efforts, especially if the first one did well. There is a danger of falling beyond the expectations of the first one. But for the band Three Days Grace, whose self titled debut album received good reviews, the risk came not in the danger of having a lesser new album, but in the long road that they traveled, the experiences that they underwent to that became the materials for their latest effort.

As how the band puts it, the constant touring for the last two years came with so high a price: being in places where everyone seemed to know you and welcome you and yet you did not really know these people. Fame indeed exacts a high price, and after all the tour dates, the band went on to recuperate and heal the wounds that they never thought they would have.

The result is, from the impersonal comes the personal, a digging in of who they are after all the tours. And that is what their new album, “One X”, is all about.

Rock has gone through a lot of phases, a lot of masks (genre, labeling, call it whatever you want.) On the technical side, Three Days Grace don’t really have something that you haven’t heard before, but there is something about how the music, the lyrics, and the arrangement all comes together to create an album worth listening to: as if they gathered a little bit of this and a little of that to create something familiar, and yet at the same time new, an ear candy worth playing and listening to over and over.

Don’t let the song titles fool you. The lyrics are direct, no attempts at poetry and stuff, and perhaps that is one of its blessings: it speaks straight at you, and tugs at your own experiences. The album is a myriad of topics: alienation, breakups, pain, second chances, warnings etc, something for everybody.

If I had the extra, this would have been one of those albums that I would have gladly shelled out some hard earned dough.