ALBUM REVIEW: Higher Power – Scott Stapp

It can be difficult to separate the man from the music when it comes to SCOTT STAPP. In his early CREED days, he was widely mocked for his wish.com Kurt Cobain vocals and the sneaking suspicion he believed himself to be the Second Coming. Since then, the ‘legal and personal troubles’ section of his Wikipedia bio has grown and grown, including domestic violence and sex videos. There is of course an irony that his music, draped in all kinds of heavenly metaphors, is at odds with some of his life choices. This is not so much a judgement of the man, but of the sincerity of his art.

So are lines like “the day I climbed out through my darkest hour / I found my higher power” the sign of a religious rebirth, or lip service to American rock radio that eats up hard-hitting – but edgeless – pop metal anthems of spiritual optimism? The record’s promotional notes describe it as a “conduit of reawakening and the deepening of one’s faith, conviction and dependence on a power greater than oneself“. Whatever the subject matter of someone’s art, and regardless of the consumer’s opinion of it, for it to be worth anything, it has to be honest. Given the recent reappraisal of NICKELBACK and their self-aware good humour, Stapp isn’t up against critical detractors so much as he has to convince the cynics. Does he mean any of it?

Given the benefit of the doubt, Higher Power is another collection by Stapp of him doing what he does best, naysayers be damned. The record’s opening track is everything to be expected from this sort of project, as is everything that follows. It all kicks off with a driving metal banger in the vein of ALTER BRIDGE and SHINEDOWN, packed full of vocal hooks – inarguably Stapp’s strongest asset as an artist. The primary school penmanship doesn’t really matter when his words are delivered in the most immediate and infectious way, almost always tinged with a specific kind of American inspiration, where everyone is overcoming something all of the time. His projects succeed on the strength of these melodies time and again, so instantaneous that you’re singing along before the end of a first listen.

This is perhaps never better than on What I Deserve. Taken from the HALESTORM school of lighters-in-the-air arena rock, its chorus is as close to perfect as this sort of music gets. It is about guilt and innocence, fire and water, deliverance and servitude, the easy thematic connections that make for memorable moments of mass singalongs. In its non-specificity, it is all inclusive, inviting listeners to project their own inner battles onto his lack of committed detail. He imagines himself a vulnerable confessor, but instead comes across as a cookie cutter preacher with little worth paying attention to.

Nothing here reinvents the wheel, and so comparisons to superior artists are inevitable. When Love Is Not Enough will never be ALICE IN CHAINS, not even with its satisfyingly crisp acoustic guitar tone. But when he leans into the modern downtuned sound of Quicksand, playing with the palette he’s assembled for himself over the years, then you gotta hand it to him: he’s still got it. Deadman’s Trigger similarly sounds like no time has passed since CREED’s world-conquering days, and is almost eerily familiar in how it could fit on an early 2000s WWE compilation. It’s cocksure brainless alt-metal for the masses, and if that’s your bag, then Stapp might really be the Second Coming. One hopes that his faith has guided him to a place that his troubles are long behind him, and that what he sings about is true to him. But even if it is honest, it is hard to shake the suspicion that Higher Power does not have much going on below the surface, that it is to music what McDonald’s is to food. But sometimes a McDonald’s is exactly what you need, and Stapp has the post-grunge equivalent down to a fine art, love him or hate him.

Rating: 6/10

Higher Power is set for release on March 15th via Napalm Records.

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