BRAND NEW SIN: Recipe For Disaster

Released: 2005

Frankly, this album was really disappointing. The promo material that came with it described Brand New Sin as "an example of everything right about hard rock" and the albums opens with an absolute killer called "Arrived" that had me thinking this was going to be a Skid Row for the new millennium. It was immediately after this however that everything turned to shit.

"The Loner" is dreck of the worst order, just meaningless, repetitive and boring crap. After that, almost anything would have been better, and Recipe for Disaster does improve. Rarely does it lift beyond the standard generic modern hard rock sound of the past decade though, and nothing like "Arrived" appears anywhere else. If that had happened, Recipe For Disaster would have been a pretty decent album. As it is, singer Joe Altier is a deadringer for Chad Kroger most of the time and the rest of the band just sound like a hevaier version of Nickleback with rather more inspired lead guitar work. Every now and then they show an edge and put up something that sounds like real attitude, but it's not often enough and overall Recipe for Disaster is just not that interesting.

"Arrived" is awesome, though.

1. Arrived
2. The Loner
3. Brown Street Betty
4. Running Alone
5. Freight Train
6. Vicious Cycles
7. Another Reason
8. Days are Numbered
9. Once in a Lifetime
10. Dead Men Walking
11. Gulch
12. Wyoming

Rating: 35%

BRAND NEW SIN: Tequila

Produced by Joey Z and Brand New Sin

Released: 2006

Brand New Sin’s previous album Recipe for Disaster was one of the most over-rated CDs of 2005. Apart from one song, I couldn’t see the value in it at all. One year later the band delivered Tequila, which is an altogether different proposition. This is the album that everyone was telling me Recipe for Disaster was supposed to be. Brand New Sin plays heavier, dirtier and meaner than on the last outing, and Tequila is thus far more satisfying. All that time on the road hanging out with Zakk Wylde, Pepper Keenan and Lemmy really paid off and they proceeded to come out with a set that the first of those gentlemen would likely be proud to call his own. This is down home southern fried heavy rock, the type you might hear in a biker bar just before an epic fight breaks out, and then with the next track becomes the soundtrack to the fight.

“Said and Done” drifts in like the Man With No Name and then swings into action with a huge slab-like groove and “Did Me Wrong” follows with metallic riff-heavy rock. Then comes “Spare the Agony”, a moodier piece with a slow-building intro of clean guitar over a rumbling bass line. This one could well have come off Black Label Society’s Mafia set. “Old” has a real commercial hook but is far too heavy for radio to play and “Motormeth” is pure flat-to-the-floor rocking. Short segments of dark acoustic guitar are sprinkled through the album too, adding a sense of overall diversity, and it winds up with a really cool version of “House of the Rising Sun” that starts out as a nicely brooding blues before loudly kicking into top gear near the end.

Whatever they might have promised before that I felt they couldn’t deliver, Brand New Sin certainly brought it home this time.

1. Said and Done
2. Did Me Wrong
3. Spare the Agony
4. Ice Man
5. The Proposition
6. Old
7. Worm Whore
8. See the Sun
9. Motormeth
10. Numero Dos
11. Elogio
12. Reaper Man
13. Acehole
14. House of the Rising Sun

Rating: 85%