Skillet -- Comatose

6/10

Eesh. I was in a bad place when Comatose came out, but listening to it when I've been in a good one for quite awhile doesn't make Skillet's major label debut any less disappointing.
It starts off well enough. "Rebirthing" takes the heavy sound of their previous album, Collide, and adds a theatrical layer, with the strings taking an even more prominent role, and John and Korey Cooper trading vocals like they're in some desperate, epic Broadway show. It's a stunning opener...and then the album takes a hard right into what can only be called watered-down pop-punk, with "The Last Night." This goes from bad to worse with a segue right into the syrupy acoustic balladry of "Yours to Hold." Then we get, "Better than Drugs," which could be followed by the parenthetical (Better than all the other songs). "Better than Drugs" chugs into existence with a riff heavier than anything found on even Collide. This leads into what I can only describe as a "skippy," piano-led verse, leading into a big, chuggy, tsunami-hooked chorus. It's also one of the only times I'd describe Skillet's music as "sexy." This then leads into the epic title track, taking a page from "Rebirthing" with its heavy guitars, active string section, and theatrical traded vocals between John and Korey. This sound is what a cohesive version of Comatose would have fed from, and hey, it's kind of sexy, too.
Instead of taking a page from its title track, Comatose offers not one, but two more pop-punk-lite songs, stacked right on top of each other. Even better, and by "better," I mean worse, the then in his 30's Cooper's lyrics for these extremely sentimental songs revolve around being a teenager. Comatose was Skillet's first platinum-selling album, so John Cooper most definitely read the trends correctly with his songwriting here...but sales figures don't dull the disappointment of a long time fan.
These two songs then lead into the theatrical hard rock of "Falling Inside the Black." Again, this is the direction the entire album should have taken. On previous albums, Skillet have taken the new element from the previous album and evolved it. 2001's Alien Youth presented a new form of heaviness for the band. Skillet took that heaviness and gave it additional weight for 2003's Collide. 2006's Comatose should have taken Collide's heaviness, and added the theatrical element for its entirety. Instead, it only does that for five songs, and gives the other six over to a mix of disposable pop-punk and cheesy balladry. By cheesy, I mean that Cooper not only rhymes "remember" with "December," but on "Say Goodbye," the band modulates. YES, *MODULATES*. Like a bad old pop song. It's dreadful. "Say Goodbye" is followed by "Whispers in the Dark," which once again teases out the album that could have been. Then the album closes on "Looking for Angels"...which is a spoken word song about looking for angels.
That's it. After the Collide-era's complete career reinvention, which suddenly gave Skillet an entirely new level of cred, they put out Comatose, an album of hopeful radio singles. And for the band, commercially, it worked! It bums me out. And when it came out, two months before I got married, when I had just moved into a city apartment and gotten a scary new full-time job, and just left the cult I grew up in, and not dealt with any of my baggage, and not taken time to become a whole or real person, and had just taken on my future wife's life instead, the deeply depressed and terrified 2006 version of me was already bummed out enough.
Now, the 2018 decidedly not bummed-out, fully-fleshed out person version of me still wishes that Skillet would have spent more time crafting Comatose into a fully-realized album, instead of a disconnected set of 11 different versions of "Hey, will you play THIS song on the radio?" Bummer indeed.


2006 Atlantic
1. Rebirthing 3:53
2. The Last Night 3:32
3. Yours to Hold 3:42
4. Better than Drugs 3:57
5. Comatose 3:50
6. The Older I Get 3:38
7. Those Nights 3:46
8. Falling Inside the Black 3:30
9. Say Goodbye 4:16
10. Whispers in the Dark 3:24
11. Looking for Angels 4:31