Daughtry - 'Leave This Town' Review

Daughtry’s second album, Leave This Town, improves on the group’s breakthrough 2006 debut, suggesting that this quintet are becoming more confident as pop-savvy hitmakers. But while it has more oomph than Daughtry, Leave This Town still suffers from frontman Chris Daughtry’s generic, middle-of-the-road arrangements and lyrics. Daughtry aren’t a particularly deep or compelling band, but they’re quite competent at making comforting rock songs and ballads that touch on universal concerns in unchallenging ways. And with Leave This Town, they make sure that every single song sounds great blasting from your stereo.

Chris Daughtry will perhaps always be burdened with the mixed blessing of his American Idol success – it propelled him into the national spotlight, but it also created an impression that he was a rock lightweight. Leave This Town doesn’t dispel that negative impression – not helping matters in that regard is that Nickelback leader Chad Kroeger co-wrote two of the album’s tracks – but if you’re going to aim for the mainstream, you might as well do it boldly, and that’s what he and his bandmates have done. Aided by producer Howard Benson, Leave This Town is one of those records that benefits from a good car or home stereo – up-tempo songs like “You Don’t Belong” need good speakers for their epic, supremely polished sound to properly rattle your insides. Even when you encounter a clunker – and Leave This Town definitely has its fair share of those – the album is a real feat of accessible, slick production. You may not like what you hear, but you’ll like how it sounds technically.

But top-of-the-line production work can only take you so far – the tunes need to be there, too. And it has to be said that about half of Leave This Town’s 12 tracks are solid, hook-heavy numbers. The first single, “No Surprise,” is typical of the album as a whole, transitioning from a melodic verse into a big, booming chorus that’s undeniably stirring. Daughtry aren’t radically different than dozens of other post-grunge bands out there now – heartfelt lyrics, guitar-driven relationship songs, sincere vocals – but the level of this band’s craft exceeds most of their contemporaries’. Take for example the country-ish ballad “Tennessee Line”: It’s a pretty standard reflection on leaving the past behind, but the expert execution of its very familiar parts gets to you, even when you know exactly how the song’s acoustic-guitar-and-fiddle arrangement will play out.

Post-grunge is often criticized for its lumbering everyman sensibility – at its worst, it’s a genre populated by hulking lead singers emoting about common-place concerns that are meant to attract the widest audience possible. Leave This Town suffers from this problem some since it’s a largely nostalgic record lamenting past loves and long-gone good times. (Chris Daughtry is so hell-bent on looking back on his life you’d think he was closer to 60 than his actual age, 29.) The tear-in-my-beer sentimentality of the record can get old, but at least he doesn’t oversell the songs’ drama by huffing and puffing his vocals. He still doesn’t have much of a personality behind the mic, but considering the genre he’s a part of, he’s admirably restrained in his singing. On Leave This Town, he and his band aren’t interested in trying to conquer the planet – they just want to make it a little more tolerable for 47 minutes. And for a good portion of the time, they succeed.

'Leave This Town' – Best Tracks:

“What I Meant to Say” (Purchase/Download)
“No Surprise” (Purchase/Download)
“You Don’t Belong” (Purchase/Download)
“Ghost of Me” (Purchase/Download)
“Tennessee Line” (Purchase/Download)

Release date – July 14, 2009
RCA Records