Rave Magazine
More like … Out Of Ideas! Badoomching!
For those who lived through the dark days of music at the end of the ‘90s, Dead By Sunrise will serve as a reminder of how music has truly progressed in that time, because according to Out Of Ashes it hasn’t. Dead By Sunrise could be classified as a nu metal supergroup, which is to say, a bunch of Middle American trailer parkers who rose to fame at the height of that genre that combined white trash woe-is-me tales of suicidal dreams and heartache with dirge-like guitars and the odd scream, and now have very little left to do with their day except watch West Coast Choppers and VH1 to see if they get a mention. Marketed as the debut solo album from Chester Bennington of Linkin Park (aka, the third biggest rap metal band of the time, which is an award similar to the third biggest idiot at the idiot festival), it also involves several members from also-rans Orgy. Out Of Ashes is also pushed as some sort of dramatic departure from Linkin Park’s overwrought misery and anger, but nothing much on the album suggests any significant changes – that is to say, it’s still childish and self-pitying. All the archetypal nu metal iconography is written into the titles (Crawl Back In, My Suffering, In The Darkness) and the music is predictable and shiny like a Linda Perry production. It’s a cheap and often remarked upon shot, but can a guy who sold 50 million albums to impressionable teens really have that much inner turmoil to sing about? Doesn’t seem like it.
