Evanescence - Sweet Sacrifice

Considered to be one of the most emotionally violent songs off the Open Door, Sweet Sacrifice is a masterpiece of unbridled hate and a very desperate sense of loathing. Rumored to be based on a series of very true and emotionally disturbing events, lyricist and vocalist Amy Lee takes every opportunity to use this one song as a form of emotional cleansing, and allows for very little restraint when opening herself up to paint this painful portrait of very ugly hatred, but when casting a song that is this emotionally charged into reality, a great deal of room is left for error. The director might not be able to fully grasp the emotional agony and torment, or while he might grasp it fully he could potentially go horribly overboard in his attempts to play out exactly what is being said. Thankfully, in the newly released video for Sweet Sacrifice neither of these two things happens. While it is not a stunningly breathtaking video in any sense of the word, it is a video that makes an immense sort of sense for the song.

Staring Amy Lee wandering through a cave of disturbing imagery and layered scenes flashing by in quick memory-like bursts, the director has done an excellent job in creating a sense of disturbed tension and restlessness as well as a somewhat pressing urge to escape. The images chosen are ones that are vaguely reminiscent of horror films – piles of bugs flashing together with various signs of occult practice and skeletal body parts – all distributed unevenly throughout a maze that one can assume is supposed to represent Amy Lee’s mind, or her subconscious. This video, however, has one very strong failing point – one that the director should have sat up and taken notice of immediately. While it is highly appealing in the sense of the ideology behind the treatment, and the success at depicting the song’s emotions, Amy Lee wandering through a maze that seems to be built of dead and decaying branches, as well as the random band shots and the artistic dragging of her Victorian gown through the mist have all been done before – in their last video Lithium.

It seems as though Evanescence will never tire of overdramatic shots of Amy Lee’s painful facial expressions as she overemphasizes torment and agony in each of her videos. The sense of wandering aimlessly in search of some unforeseen goal has become a sort of theme for the past two videos, and may very well carry on to the next. While the band shots have been craftily layered over the rest of the video to flash with grainy resolution in combination with the rest of the imagery provided in this video, the shots themselves are not all that original. Ultimately this video is okay, not great, but not horrible either. It manages to really flaunt its 'rock vibe' while simultaneously displaying all the right emotions and bringing them to life through the very well chosen imagery. However, Evanescence needs to practice originality, or else they might find their fan-base growing extremely bored with videos that continuously show Amy walking under canopies of dead branches prettily dressed in Victorian style gowns that trail in highly artistic fashions through snow and mist and rain and whatever else.

Review by Einat Brigler


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