Maybe You Can Remember Yourself

Evanescence “Call Me When You’re Sober” – It won’t be long before my ballots for both the Jackin’ Pop and Pazz & Jop critic polls will be available online, and so I figured now might be a good time to preemptively explain how this Evanescence song ended up on both of my singles ballots in spite of never being mentioned on this site ever. I did write about the Evanescence record for Urge, but I’m probably correct in guessing that most of you never read that, though maybe that will change once they start putting the blogs on the Urge site rather than just having them embedded in an online store that can only be read if you have the current Windows Media Player on your computer.

I’m probably also correct in assuming that even though “Call Me When You’re Sober” ranks among the biggest rock hits of 2006, a majority of the people reading this either actively avoid any mainstream outlet for rock music (this is generally not a bad call if you live in North America) or tuned this out if they have heard it for, among other potential reasons, the simple fact that it is a song by Evanescence. I’m not going to front — it took two years or so for my feeling about them to shift from initial disdain to benign indifference by the time “My Immortal” was a crossover hit, and so I can understand why a person may have a problem with a Christian rock band that sounds more or less like Tori Amos and Tool collaborating on a musical theatre production of a semi-goth teenage girl’s livejournal.

I’m still not particularly fond of their previous album, and I suppose my new fondness for them is tied in with the fact that the band’s songwriting is now dominated by singer Amy Lee, and that Ben Moody, the chief architect of Fallen, is long gone. That guy’s tendency for the maudlin and the bloated weighed down several otherwise catchy numbers from that record, and though the new songs stick with the enormous, melodramatic sound that made them rich, the arrangements seem far more agile and lithe.

“Call Me When You’re Sober,” their best song and the lead single from The Open Door, is an immense power ballad that harnesses their heavy dirge riffs and penchant for extreme dynamic shifts in service of a powerhouse vocal performance by Lee that reveals her to be Kelly Clarkson’s nearest peer in contemporary rock music. It’s a perfectly constructed and highly effective song, especially in the way it pulls the listener into its emotional reality whether you relate to the tough love break-up scenario in its lyrics or not. I certainly can’t identify on a literal level, but the words and the music ring so true that it seems to be tapping into something archetypal like few other hits from this year. (Click here to buy it from Amazon.)