It’s just been a year since Pillar’s last release, 2008′s For The Love Of The Game. Not much has changed in a year – Pillar is still cranking out generic, derivative rock music. Pillar, as always, remains a competent band with decent money behind them and a reasonably-sized primarily-Christian fanbase.

That’s about all the good I can say here. I get the impression they’ve been really trying hard to do something interesting and different since rapcore died, but this album is a train wreck… and the Confessions should be about how many “hard” rock, grunge, and rock-and-roll bands they ripped off trying to make things sound different. Apparently, they were going for a reinvention of their approach to “songwriting and studio production as well as half [their] line-up”. This means, among other things Confessions sports “guest songwriters” (five of them – all from outside the band), a producer other than Travis Wyrick (a first), and most distinctly a grip of songs that is anything other than the “rich, melodic, transparent, and hard-hitting … with weighty appeal” claimed in the press release.

Confessions starts out with an “Intro” that’s basically 10 seconds of ramping-up guitars that segue into the lead track “Fire On The Inside”. I’ll warn you straight up, this is one of two songs on the album that actually sound like a Pillar track (the other being the last track on the album “You Are Not The End”). There’s very little rock happening on Confessions – perhaps the album’s title is meant to be a sign… that says in big, capital letters:

WARNING! PILLAR THOUGHT IT WOULD BE REALLY COOL TO MAKE A ‘SOFTER, GENTLER’ ALBUM. PROCEED WITH CAUTION AND EARPLUGS. AND CYNICISM.

The next couple cuts on the record display this perfectly, as well as hinting at a lot of what’s to come on the record: plagiarism.

Earlier I mentioned that Pillar ripped off other bands to make Confessions. What exactly did I mean by that? Well, when you reach track five and it starts up, you’ll be expecting to hear these words:

“Everything’s so blurry, and everyone’s so fake.
Everybody’s empty, and everything is so messed up.”

Why? Because the verses of “Better Off Now” snatch their chord progression, vocal pattern, harmonic picking, and general aesthetics from Puddle Of Mudd’s hit song “Blurry”. That song is almost 10 years old now. Maybe they thought nobody would notice. The only real change from the song they stole is that Pillar wrote a non-grunge chorus for the otherwise lifted music. Which could have been a good thing, except they replace it with their brand of soft rock radio-friendly jello. Not exactly a positive spin.

It’s one thing to borrow a page from great musicians, but Puddle of Mudd was basically a Nirvana cover band in disguise that ended up being essentially a one-hit wonder. Hearing this kind of drivel makes me wish Pillar had just called it quits after Above. Or before that, preferably.

If that weren’t enough, I used to think that Rob Beckley (Pillar’s vocalist) at least had a distinguishable voice – particularly after he gave up the rapping he was never any good at. Confessions does away with that concession, since it finds Beckley pulling a page from the vocal tones and styles of Our Lady Peace’s Raine Maida on various tracks – most distinctly on “Will You Be There”. He also borrows heavily from Thousand Foot Krutch’s Trevor McNevan on “Call To Action” and elsewhere.

The fact that Pillar chose this album to be their first LP with cover songs on it shouldn’t come as any surprise at this point. Late in the album, Pillar turns in an entirely unremarkable cover of Collective Soul’s “Shine” and a cover of a song that hasn’t even been released yet – “Call To Action” by Knoxville band Copper. In both cases, the reproductions are faithful but add absolutely nothing to the songs. In fact, Pillar’s covers are far less interesting, far less detailed, and far less listenable than the originals.

Cover songs aside, the original songs on Confessions are a confused bunch. Pillar’s intent to pull off some kind of softer, gentler side comes off as forced and uninteresting. Every once and awhile they try to bust out some kind of ‘hardcore breakdown’, but it falls flat and empty because it never fits nor does it actually sound heavy when its in the context of an otherwise ‘trying really hard to be both rich AND melodic’ song (see: “Whatever It Takes”).

Lyrically, there’s nothing here you wouldn’t already expect from Pillar – who have never been home to particularly deep, introspective, or… well… confessional lyrics. Their misguided attempt to go against the grain of what they’ve done prior to this comes off as awkward, forced, and derivative as the music and the vocals do.

It’s telling that Pillar made it their goal to make “every song on this album … a great fit for radio”, because – bottom line – if you’ve listened to rock music on the radio during the last two decades, you have heard this album already. I can respect wanting to change and evolve, but in attempting to do so, Pillar has put together a selection of 10 songs that neither cohere nor rock, and the utter lack of originality or innovation conjures up but one utterly horrific comparison: Nickleback.

So, essentially, what you’ll get with Confessions is a couple bad covers, a handful of flagrant unoriginality, and an earfull of sounds you’ve already heard elsewhere. If you’re a Pillar fan, stick to their old stuff. If you’re not a Pillar fan, stay away from this one just like you’d stay away from Frankenstein’s ravenous monster.

Zero Klepto’s out of Five.

Standout Tracks: None of them. Sorry.

Jerry Bolton – for The Phantom Tollbooth.
September 28th, 2009

Title: For the Love of the Game
Artist: Pillar
Label: Sony BMG Home Entertainment & Essential Records
Length: 17 Tracks / 58:02

Before I begin, let me first clear the air. I haven’t heard Pillar’s entire back-catalog, nor have I thought much of them to this point.

I thought Pillar’s first record, 2000′s Above, was awful – trite, cliché, formulaic, riding the rapcore bandwagon (poorly), and chock-full of boring music and decidedly sunday-school lyrics. I wrote them off, and to be honest I was surprised that they not only survived that first record, but managed to put out a listenable and marketable sophomore product in 2002′s Fireproof. Fireproof wasn’t anything too spectacular, but it was a night-and-day improvement – engaging, slightly less predictable, and the lyrical content actually contained some decidedly less regrettable songwriting. Particularly once they had the album re-mixed and remastered in 2003, I enjoyed it. For the most part my exposure to Pillar has been minimal since, other than hearing snatches of 2004′s Where Do We Go From Here. I haven’t heard any of their EP’s (which they started to release inbetween albums following Fireproof), and I haven’t heard their 2006 effort The Reckoning.

So, with that as my background of exposure to Pillar, I must report that their new record, entitled For The Love Of The Game, to my mostly uninitiated ears, sounds like a lot of other bands right now. Specifically, it sounds like a lot of other bands whose genres are dying or dead. In this case, Pillar started out as rapcore, segued into nu-metal, and now that both genres are dead they are trying their hands at the same kind of “rock and roll” that a lot of other bands in similar situations have been lately. The best example to reference would be Linkin Park, who recently abandoned their rapcore/nu-metal roots in favour of a similar rock sound on their recent 2007 outing Minutes To Midnight (with similar results). As a side, sometimes it sounds inescapably like Pillar’s Rob Beckley is channelling Linkin Park’s Chester Bennington, particularly when yelling.

What you have here, basically, is a rock album. Nothing too fancy, written to appeal both to those who like their music “Christian” and to those who like their music suitable for play at the local sports venue. Lyrically, Pillar isn’t particularly preachy, and their lyrics aren’t even remotely what we saw back on Above. Indeed, I found them enjoyable as a whole, if not particularly challenging or thought-provoking. A notable would be the second track, entitled “Turn It Up” – a failed experiment in trying to fridge-magnet lyrics together out of the names of notable albums and songs from Christian music history. The fun and/or depressing thing about it was identifying each reference offhand. As an example:

I’m drawing a black line
Define the great line
Maybe I just feel so alive
It’s a super good feeling
So I’ll keep waiting
(from “Turn It Up”)

(If you recognized album titles by Project 86 and Underoath as well as song titles by P.O.D., Bleach, and Stavesacre in there, you get bonus points.)

So, while I admire Pillar for referencing some of the great musical juggernauts of the past 15 years all in half a verse here, the song comes off as filler… ie. “we couldn’t write anything good so here’s something we spent 15 minutes throwing together”. Can’t say as much for the music – the track is one of the more enjoyable on the album – and maybe that captures my response to For The Love Of The Game as a whole: mixed feelings.

This is fairly run of the mill alternative radio-rock music: at times anthemic, at times touchy-feely, and between lyrical and sonic content… pretty consistently less-than-challenging. Just like the aforementioned Linkin Park album.

If you’re a big Pillar fan, you’re probably already in love with The Game. If not, you might want to look elsewhere to satiate your alternative rock needs.

Two Team Flags out of Five.

Standout Tracks: For The Love Of The Game, Throw Down, Forever Starts Now.

Jerry Bolton
08/17/08