Alter Bridge: Ranking Every Album From Worst To Best
4. AB III
From the SECOND I heard Isolation, I knew this was going to be one hell of an album. I mean talk about stepping it up. The opening riff from this lead single was so crunchy, so powerful and so immediately attention-grabbing, it took Alter Bridge into stadiums the world over.
Isolation would top the Billboard rock chart and stay there for weeks, elevating the reach of the band tenfold. So many rock fans cite Metalingus from One Day Remains as AB's "biggest song", but it's Isolation by a country mile.
If you want to give one song to someone and say "Here. This is why you should care about Alter Bridge", it's not Edge's theme song, it's Isolation.
As for the rest of the album, Myles Kennedy took lead songwriting duties, and the whole thing is a concept album.
Centred around a wandering soul searching for purpose and meaning, it came from Myles suffering from the hearing condition known as Tinnitus, and how this affected the very thing he wanted to do to make a living.
AB III is supremely melancholic. It's louder, crunchier moments like Isolation, Still Remains and I Know It Hurts are juxtaposed with Ghost of Days Gone By, the homeward-longing Couer D'Alene, and the utterly astonishing, tears-in-my-eyes it is gorgeous Words Darker than Their Wings.
This latter track saw the debut of Mark Tremonti on lead vocals, trading passages with Myles, as the song came from a conversation the pair had on the nature of belief. Myles represents an atheistic viewpoint while Mark chooses to believe, the pair of them uniting for the chorus, where they admit to each other they'll only "find truth alone" at the end.
AB III also has my favourite vocal performance from Myles, where on the track Breathe Again, after descending into a lyrical passage about redemption and trying, the sheer amount of notes he goes through in this one ginormous ascending passage, is something else.
The phrase "Oh Myles God" came from moments like this.
Ultimately, AB III was a mature extension of the positive, uplifting message so many of their songs already had. It tends to get overlooked thanks to the subject matter and its conceptual nature, but as a body of work... I could totally see someone saying it's their personal favourite.
It certainly used to be mine.