By Heather Yarnell, June 2007

Amy Lee is proud of herself. Three songs into The Open Door, Evanescence's follow-up to 2003's mainstream breakthrough Fallen and first release since the departure of co-founder Ben Moody, she directs listeners:

If you love me, then let go of me
I won't be held down by who I used to be
She's nothing to me!

This is her declaration of creative independence, and you can hear in her voice she's confident that, with each of the album's thirteen tracks, she's sending anyone who ever doubted her shrinking into the shadows. Unfortunately, for all of Lee's promises to steer Evanescence in a more artistic and less mainstream direction, name-dropping in pre-release interviews artists such as Björk, Pink Floyd, Tori Amos and Depeche Mode as direct inspirations for the new batch of songs, the bulk of The Open Door is alarmingly stagnant and one-note. Apparently, artistry is best defined to Lee by vapid lyrics and aimless, indistinguishable musical landscapes. Though the band does branch out a bit musically, The Open Door is dominated (and therefore, ruined) by Lee's juvenile, self-important lyrics and pretentious delivery. Those lyrics sound more like a fan's awkward attempts to come up with some Evanescence-inspired poetry than words from the pen of the woman who inspired that fan to write in the first place. Lee is so distracted with proving herself that she becomes the band's weakest link; a wailing mannequin wanting both your pity and your admiration. For a vocalist formerly capable of wringing every drop of emotion out of each melodramatic phrase that she and her bandmates could come up with, it's hard to imagine a bigger downgrade than this. In fact, the end result is not all that different from Christina Aguilera's recently released Back to Basics. Though they are decidedly different projects that no one will confuse musically, both albums are steered by a star so driven by the all-encompassing need to please that the music takes a backseat to the posturing. While a few songs contain fleeting moments of promise ("Good Enough" delivers a vocal performance that is relaxed and genuine, "Snow White Queen" is successful in setting a claustrophobic mood and "Like You," though not in possession of the same uninterrupted grace of Fallen's "Hello," Lee's previous ode to her departed sister, is one of the album's few moments of unaffected emotion), these reprieves are few and far between. What we're left with is a series of forgettable songs - the cheap "Call Me When You're Sober," the lifeless "Cloud Nine" and the bewildering "Lacrymosa," which pastes a simple and conventional relationship-gone-wrong tale on top of the Lacrimosa sequence from Mozart's Requiem. While it's yet to be seen if the Evanescence brand can bounce back from such a considerable misfire, I'm betting that most interested in finding out will keep Fallen and not the tedious The Open Door in rotation until the answer presents itself.