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BMG | twitter.com/evanescence |
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Faux-classical covers of popular songs are a dime a dozen, as even the most cursory of YouTube searches can confirm, and the appeal is self-evident. Who wouldn’t want to take a favourite artist and lend them grandeur and gravity, linking them to a musical pedigree dating back the better part of a millennium? Mid-aughts metal has burrowed itself into a statistically unlikely niche — there is a persistent lick of grunge to the subgenre’s chugging guitars, as to be expected from those who grew up mainlining Nirvana and their contemporaries, rendering them ripe for a contrasting translation into sawing strings.
But few and far between are the musicians leaping into the fray for themselves. And so everyone’s favourite histrionic goth-metal band has penned an album of fan fiction, to splendid effect. Synthesis is a compilation of the band’s biggest hits, rehydrated with melodramatic orchestration and stamped with a scintillating sizzle of electronica.
Some tracks have been considerably beefed up (the gasping ‘Lithium,’ the serpentine ‘Lost In Paradise’), others gently reupholstered (the infamous ‘My Immortal’). But Synthesis is at its best when it completely guts the original and turns it into something new.
Evanescence has chiselled out rusty old gears and cogs and inserted shiny smooth-spinning replacements. ‘Lacrymosa’ luxuriates in a slower, simmering buildup, making more sparing use than the original of its namesake interpolation — a sequence of the same title from Mozart’s Requiem (replacing the stuffy old Latin ‘i’ for a cooler, edgier letter). And while they saved the skin of smash single ‘Bring Me to Life,’ it has been entirely untaxidermed, freshly hot and thrashing and alive.