2003: Fallen, Evanescence
By Carl Lewandowski
As a kid I always kind of thought Evanescence’s Fallen was a Christmas album. In my defense, it’s not such a stretch. Winter, Amy Lee sings, is “a world of fragile things.” There are delicate twinkling pianos. She name drops Jesus here and there. It’s plausible. I didn’t know the album was called Fallen for a long time—in our house, it was known as, “The Cleaning CD,” my mom’s favored soundtrack for housework. At cleaning-heavy Christmastime, it joined the canonical 50s Christmas albums in our five-disc CD player. Naturally, I came to associate the nu metal masterpiece with the most wonderful time of the year, and especially with my mom, wearing her Cleaning Shirt (an old baggy black shirt already stained with bleach) and holding a canister of Clorox wipes.
To call Fallen a foundation of my taste in music would be an understatement; this record is one of the earliest things I remember hearing, a formative part of my very definition of music. I don’t particularly remember 2003; Fallen may as well have always been part of my life. Listening to Fallen from such a young age, and at such frequent intervals, it took me a while to recognize the misery of the music. My mom tells a story about having her dad listen to Prince’s “Little Red Corvette,” thinking he’d love it because it was about a car; she laughs and cringes imagining what he must have been thinking and not saying. I became habituated to Fallen with similarly naive ears.
The big reassessment came in high school. I did my shift as a suicidal teen; I don’t wish to either overstate or downplay what I went through. At the time I let myself take a little carrion comfort in the idea that if I was irreparable, at the very least this made me more interesting. I won’t dwell on all that. Point is, around that time I began to find solace in heavy, hard, rough music, which led me back to Fallen with new ears. Something so familiar that it had come to feel like one of the default states of music suddenly seemed new—deep, dark, and dreamy.
And let me be clear here, I’m not just going to bat for Fallen as an album that’s meaningful to me personally—I’m arguing that this album is, seriously, great. Its melodies hinge on eerie, graceful, dramatic half-steps that turn small pivots in pitch into tectonic emotional payoff. Lee’s vocals are gorgeous and hot-blooded, and a variety of singing styles and electronic effects expand her expressive palette. Spare arrangements of piano and electronics create delicate sound worlds (see: “Hello”) that then get shattered by spectacular walls of eclectic, intense sound (see the very next track, “My Last Breath,” where the massive distorted guitar line braids together with a string section and trip-hoppy percussion trades off with an acoustic rock drumset.) And the production holds up. The electronic soundscapes are fun and spooky, with backmasking and FM synth bells. There are gulpy, scrapey, splotchy percussion moments throughout the record that I can compare in good faith to Björk’s Homogenic or to the best of IDM. The album’s distortion is exploratory and diverse, motivated by what feels like a genuine love of the possibilities of noise. The guitar solo in “Haunted” has this odd plasticky quality, fizzy in the upper register and slick on the downturns, which contrasts with the ragged, bloody squeals of the guitars on the next track, “Tourniquet.”
“Tourniquet,” by the way, is my favorite song on Fallen. An expanded remake of a track by Christian death metal band Soul Embraced (a band with whom Evanescence shared their drummer), Evanescence strip away the rhythmic chugging and expand the the timbral palette; the dry, crunchy guitar tone of the original somehow hits less hard than the punchy, glossy bursts in Evanescence’s version, which benefit from the the denser, richer atmosphere they have to contrast with. Lee filigrees and unfurls the original vocal line into a soaring, throttling new melody. The accidental in the figure for the words “I’m screaming” scratches something in the back of my skull every time.
And Lee’s vocals let the lyrics shine more clearly than in the original version. Evanescence isn’t really a Christian band, but they sure as hell aren’t not a Christian band. For the many of us who live complicatedly in the wake of faith, that blurriness is resonant and familiar. “Tourniquet” is explicitly a desperate call for Christian salvation, and it’s moving whether read at religious face value or as allegory. Its closing lyrics are genuinely theologically engrossing: Lee calls out to Christ, and then appends two other epithets: “tourniquet, my suicide.” It makes sense to compare this figure of sacrifice and salvation and resurrection to a tool for staunching bleeding—but then to add self-extinction into this set of equivalencies is a jarring, stunning volta. In Catholic school one sees a lot of silly diagrams explaining the trinity: suicide is not a tourniquet is not Christ is not suicide… but whatever mystery all three of them are, it’s an object of desperate, profound spiritual yearning. That nuanced understanding of suicidality rings truer to my own experiences than most depictions do.
During my high school years, and maybe still today, Evanescence’s presence in the zeitgeist was largely as a joke. “Bring Me to Life” was a meme thanks to a viral video of a man dressed as Goofy singing along in the cartoon character’s voice, flailing melodramatically. No shade meant towards the video; I remember a night at a friend’s house where we passed around a phone to watch it and we laughed our asses off. But the premise of the joke is that “Bring Me to Life” is a ludicrous song, its emotionality overblown and its earnestness tactless and regrettable. But what makes Fallen so great is precisely that Evanescence absolutely is not joking—every choral waterfall, string swell, and gnarly scream hits with absolute conviction. The album closes on frantic string runs and chanted Latin—it’s stupid, and it rocks. If this album were not as entirely heartfelt as it is, the whole thing would feel sour and flimsy; as it is, you can sink into its currents, and even the parts that really should be goofy and cringey can carry you along with genuine force.
At some point I stopped wanting to die. Hilariously, that realization felt a little like a betrayal, a little like setting aside a childhood dream. The notion that I would be a teen suicide was at one time a cornerstone of my sense of self. Made me feel doomed and romantic. It was very disorienting to let that go. “Still can't find what keeps me here,” Lee says, “when all this time I've been so hollow inside.” But something does keep her here, even if she can’t put her finger on it. I mean, yeah.
These days, the Cleaning CD is still my go-to choice when vacuuming or scrubbing. In my head there remains a very visceral connection between the album and the activity; whenever I listen to Fallen my brain conjures the smells of Simple Green and Old English floor polish. Its walls of distortion and symphony stand up well to—even compliment—the drone of the vacuum cleaner. Even when I’ve lived alone I always feel a silly pang of injustice and resentment at having to clean, a little unearned note of the feminine mystique. Fallen lets me blow that little annoyance up into a bombastic martyrdom whose pageantry carries me through the chore. And despite the annoyance, cleaning is very therapeutic—destructive and violent, but simultaneously restorative—which pairs very nicely with the violence and healing of Evanescence’s maudlin, gothic metal.
I think that’s a big part of the appeal of a record like this; the emotional extravagance might rarely be “earned” by the listener’s circumstances, but it often fits the actual feelings. (“This pain is just too real,” as Lee puts it on “My Immortal.”) Because the album is crafted for maximum cathartic impact, it coddles and purges any disproportionate feelings of despair. Fallen is an emotional-realist text: it’s not really an apocalyptic affair to clean the basement, but it can sure feel that way.
For example. My mom and her siblings have been cleaning out their childhood home over the last year or so, a big old house their late parents stuffed to the gills with the sentimental sediment of a lifetime of living. I can’t imagine my mom’s feelings; I would feel so paralyzed on that knife’s edge between trash and treasure. I don’t know if my mom put on Fallen during any of her trips to a home she was tasked with removing her own history from, but I imagine it would give loud, visceral voice to that surreal and too-quiet nightmare.
Hoarding, grief, cleaning, and catharsis writhe together here in a knot I’m too scared to untie. Margareta Magnusson advocates a practice of döstädning, “death cleaning,” in which aging people declutter so their next of kin don’t have to, but I don’t know that a straightforward association between cleaning and preparation for death appeals to me. Because while cleaning is self-effacing, an endeavor to erase the evidence and detritus of your living, more often it’s really a preparation for continued life, a way of keeping a space habitable and happy.
I return, as I often do, to that koan of a trinity: Christ, tourniquet, suicide. In cleaning, in grieving, in suicide ideation, and in heavy music, lust for life and the death drive surge and churn into new emotional states. Fallen blossoms in that chiaroscuro: Lee screeches on “Tourniquet” that she wants to die, but later on she holds her last breath. The dust in my room is my own damn fault; it’s mainly dead skin. Vacuuming it up, I have the privilege of participating in my own funeral. I’m shout-singing along to my own dirge: “BRING ME TO LIFE!”
Carl Lewandowski is an educator, writer, and musician from Cincinnati, currently living and working in New York City. Other publications include translations, poems, and essays in Ancient Exchanges, Animus Classics Journal, the Cincinnati Enquirer, and elsewhere. You can find his music at muddyvesture.bandcamp.com.