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The thing that most amazes me about this dark, Goth, extraordinarily bizarre band’s albums is how much (almost joyful) energy penetrates their sound and how sane they all sound in the program notes. Yet there is here also sorrow and a mind dancing with the possibility of losing itself.
The tightness of the guitar-bass-drum combo grows on me as I listen and becomes almost the calling card of the band, though most of us are drawn to Evanescence in the first instance by Amy Lee’s voice.
‘Lithium’ eloquently summons up the conflicting desires of strugglers with depression (a clause I use not out of political correctness but rather descriptive accuracy), who often ‘want to stay in love with their sorrow’ even as they cry out, repeatedly, ‘But God I want to let go.’
The more celebrated (by air-time at least) ‘Call Me When You’re Sober’ helps us savor for a moment the aftertaste of a less benign chemical.
If honesty about foreign substances is a theme of the album, let’s add ‘Lacrymosa’, with its ecclesiastical name and choral backdrop. There it is too-quick love that has poisoned the body and the body politic shared by two lovers who can’t make it stick. Lee is willing to go this far:
I don’t want to hold you back now love
I can’t change who I am
not this time, I won’t lie to keep you near me
and in this short life,
there’s no time to waste on giving up
my love wasn’t enoughAnd you can blame it on me
just set you guilt free, honey
I don’t want to hold you back now love
It is Lee’s reference to ‘honey’ and ‘love’ that makes this tune anguished rather than trite, and therefore worthy.
Evanescence save the most beautiful song of the album for the final track (‘Good Enough’). A poignant sadness–all too real–lingers about this tune. The measure of the art is that it leaves the listener himself feeling sad. For the singer. For those who listen, and those who do not, and only feel ‘good enough’.
In spite of album-insert words that suggest a connection with transcendence, Amy Lee and her fellow travelers in Evanescence are a little too much in love with death and in need of some light and life. I fear that even Lee’s seductive voice is not versatile enough to sustain this tone over the long haul, artistically and perhaps personally.
What this reviewer longs for is for Lee and Company to realize that there is someone who remembers her name (‘Lose Control’), capable of replacing her fascinated fear of the dark, and able to move the voice she’s been given on to sing both solidly and authentically for as far as the eye can see.
Canter Bridge 
Amy Lee is by far one of the few female singer / songwriters in my personal top 10. My understanding of Amy’s history is that she had (has) a strong Xian background. This is and of it’s self would cause anyone to fear death or the dark inner space where I reside. Amy has not embrased her dark side. She fears it In some sence this is the allure I have for her music … that and her piano playing. When she does finally embrace it the music will be better. For now.. it’s interesting to watch the fear and listen to the agnst. (I do have to chuckle.. been there – done that). We all have to learn!