3 Doors Down's Reales New Album "Time Of My Life"
LOS ANGELES (TheWrap) - It's not just that 3 Doors Down is the wimpiest band in what passes for hard rock. The material on their fifth album, "Time of My Life," would seem just as milquetoast transplanted to a less aggressive genre.
You imagine country artists rejecting this material as too corny, Christian pop singers snubbing it as too inspirational and "American Idol" finalists begging for coronation songs with a little more edge.
Not that you'd want to accuse them of being formulaic, God forbid. But for nearly the entirety of its length, "Time of My Life" alternates odd-numbered up-tempo quasi-rockers with even-numbered power ballads. What all these tunes have in common is that the band is working so hard at being both female- and radio-friendly that they never sound like they're having the slightest lick of fun.
Only on the 12th and final number, when they trade the ballad that should by rights go into that slot for the honestly fast and ferocious "Believer," does 3 Doors Down sound like it set out to have a good time instead of a hit.
All the care that went into making the album as bland and inoffensive as possible may have been for naught. The leadoff single, "When You're Young," wasn't much of a smash, despite appealing to younger fans with a first-person account of how hard it is to be a teenager -- an empathetic approach that worked back when Alice Cooper was doing "I'm Eighteen" but just comes off as demographic pandering from these thirtysomething rockers.
