8 years prior to E. L. James’s unleashing the erotic juggernaut Fifty Shades of Grey that sold 100+ million copies, Staind showed up at #1 on charts with this week’s review: 14 Shades of Grey.
Artist: Staind {Aaron Lewis (vocals, rhythm guitar), Mike Mushok (lead guitar), Johnny April (bass guitar), Jon Wysocki (drums)}
Album: 14 Shades of Grey
Year: 2003
Genre: Post-Grunge
Rating: 1/5
Worth Your Time? You’re better off experimenting with how to get your fist inside of your mouth. (Like this young lady or this young lady.)
Twitter Review: This album really needs to be renamed 14 Small Variations of a Shade of Grey. Who knew you could rewrite the same song 13 times and sell it?
Top 3 Tracks:
Things to Look For:
- Pete and Repeat Were in a Boat. The similarity in the structure of all the songs is unbelievable. It’s basically Aaron with unprocessed usually overly vague vocals followed by a wall of sound and Aaron’s usually even more vague vocals layered many times over so he can even beging to compete with the wall behind him. This repeats a couple times then the next song starts.
- Pete Fell Out. I cannot believe how they used the same approach over and over again throughout this album. Essentially, Aaron does a verse with his voice unaltered and reasonable instrumentation followed by a heavily processed chorus with many layers of Aaron’s voice and this insane wall of sound. To add insult to injury, most song lyrics are so unclear that you barely care what the song was about.
- Who’s Left? My mind cannot even begin to process how Staind could release an album that is packed with such similar sounding songs. It’s just 14 variations of Aaron switching back and forth between singing vague lyrics with his vocals unaltered intermingled with this ear fatigue inducing wall of sound that can only be taken on by processing Aaron’s vocals with layering beyond any reasonable amount.
High Points: There are far too many low points to discuss so I think it might be more interesting to talk about the high points instead. I listened to this album one final time before I started to write the review because I had such a hard time picking out individual songs. As I took notes on the tracks, my original score kept dropping and dropping until it got to one. I honestly considered giving it a zero out of five but there are some redeeming songs on here that let me put aside everything wrong with this album for a moment.
Let’s start of with Zoe Jane. This song is about Aaron’s relationship with his young daughter and probably his strongest song lyrically. (which really isn’t saying much unfortunately) I think it accurately captures that incredibly deep emotional bond that is created between a parent and child. It covers: unconditional love, the connection you get just by looking into your child’s eyes and having them look back at you, the need to want to shelter them from everything cruel in this world that you’ve experienced while trying to open their eyes to everything amazing around them and finally becoming so emotionally overwhelmed to the point of tears because you cannot always be there for them no matter how much you want to be.
The other song we need to discuss is Layne. It is actually a tribute to one of the gods of grunge: Layne Staley, the lead singer of Alice in Chains, who died alone of drug overdose in 2002 after years of dealing with depression and drug addiction. Tragically, his body was not discovered until two weeks after he died. He was only 34 and his death had immediate impact on the music scene which inspired many, including Aaron Lewis, to pay their respects to a man who had so much musical influence on their life. One notable aspect of this song is the beginning which opens up with Aaron vocalizing which reminded me of the Alice in Chain’s grunge classic Man in the Box.
Anything Else: So my wife and I do not have any children. We do not want children. We are never going to have children. So why did I connect so much with Zoe Jane on this album without being a parent myself? It’s actually a pretty simple answer: my friends. I’m lucky enough to be surrounded by couples who are absolutely amazing parents. I’ve seen the most serious and reserved of my friends turn into the biggest goofballs just to get an extra smile or laugh from their child. It’s almost like in that moment the whole world around them disappears. To me, that speaks volumes of how intense the parent/child relationship is. The amount of effort and sacrifice my friends put into being parents is awe inspiring quite honestly. I’m happy I get to witness all of these beautiful little moments between them and their children. If you’re looking for examples of what awesome parents do, I would highly suggest checking out JAKE’s Place which is run by a friend and awesome parent, [J].
Additional Links:
Project Lt. Morning 
It’s funny because the only song I know from Staind is So Far Away but after reading your post I checked out the Zoe Jane song and I totally see what you mean that the songs sound the same. This must have been a really hard week for you. So, when you come across an album like this, do you delete it or do you keep it? Just wondering 🙂 (btw, thanks again for the shout out)
If I didn’t delete Britney Spears’ Email My Heart from my collection nor the Eminem song that almost made me throw up at work, it would be unfair to delete 14 Shades of Grey. I’m glad though you could see the similarities. After I published the review, I started to wonder if maybe I had somehow imagined it. And yes it was an incredibly hard week. The only nice side effect was any song that wasn’t by Staind sounded noticeably better. It was almost like my ears were starved for good music.