OK, confession time. I used to like Creed. It was the end of the 90's, and for most of the 90's radio was dead to me after Kurt Cobain took a shotgun to himself. I got big time in to rock with the metal boom in the late 80s and again with Grunge, and then Cobain died... Soundgarden split up, Layne Stayley went AWOL, Pearl Jam were basically in exile because they were fighting Ticketmaster... even other rock was suffering. Faith No More kicked out their metal dude (Jim Martin), Living Colour split up. Jane's Addiction split up. All you had were Rage against the Machine, Stone Temple Pilots, Tool and Live to survive the entire 90's. It was a tough time.
So I had been missing rock, and in the same way sailors mistake manatees for mermaids, you hear this band with something that sounds like a rock guitar and a guy whose trying to sound like a either Eddie Vedder or Jim Morrison, you go... OK, maybe rock is back.
And in their defense, Tremoti is a kick-ass guitarist - witness Alter Bridge, and occasionally, in, say, a song like Higher, they let his create a rift that could have been a great rock rift.
But again, it's Scott Stapp, and I'm not someone turned off by religion (I have POD and Evanescence in my CD collection), but at the time I didn't have a TV and a friend of mine nudged me about the band when he found out I listened to them.
"Watch them on TV, you'll see what I mean".
And he was right. The moment Scott Stapp did a "Jesus Christ" pose you get the whole thing right there. Over the top posing... self-important looks... videos that make him look like a saint for turning down groupies... yeah, what a bag.
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