15 tracks · 56 min
Fun does not seem to come easily to Chris Daughtry, the leader and namesake of DAUGHTRY. Even when he was the leading rocker on American Idol at the peak of its popularity, he never seemed to enjoy being on the big stage and that sourness carried over to his professional career, when he consciously chose to brood instead of party. This served him well for a while, but eventually the specter of middle age loomed, both in his personal life and in his career, as he started to stare down the horizon of a decade in the biz. Faced with slightly diminishing returns -- 2011's Break the Spell was the first DAUGHTRY record to not go platinum, or to spawn a Top 20 single -- Chris Daughtry decided to look on the bright side of life for Baptized, his fourth album as the frontman of DAUGHTRY. Baptized seems like a standard-issue post-grunge title -- the kind of heavily weighted one-word nonsense that suggests big, serious things -- but the album itself is by no means a neo-grunge throwback. DAUGHTRY is quite conscious of what year it is, so he's happy to alternate between super-stylized soft rock sculpted on a computer -- anytime there is a power ballad, which is often, the precision is exact --…
