My Darkest Days, MY DARKEST DAYS

Average bands make good songs, while great bands make good albums. Canadian rockers My Darkest Days fall into the former category, as their debut album My Darkest Days peters out pretty quickly.

My Darkest Days begins with such promise. "Move That Body" has crashing drums and catchy metal guitars blasting away over a song abiout getting down. After that comes a track whose title pretty much says it all: "Porn Star Dancing." This is a raunchy, no-holds-barred celebration of really dirty dancing that should be mandatory at every strip club across America. (It also gets a revisit later in the album with additional singing from Ludacris.)

After that, the album veers sharply into Nickleback territory, with much less energy and long, stretched-out guitar chords. (It's quite fitting that the only cover here is Duran Duran's "Come Undone.") Worse, the band abandons their hard-rockin' lyrics for lovelorn songs about former or absent women -- including one about a girlfriend going away to college for the first time! While these songs aren'tterrible, they aren't memorable either; and they fall well short of the album's opening two tracks.

My Darkest Days could have been a terrific rock album, but it peters out very quickly. This is a definite case where the singles are light years ahead of the rest of the songs.

Overall grade: C-
Reviewed by James Lynch