ALBUM REVIEW: For The Love Of Metal – Dee Snider
Partnerships between musicians have over the years been the genesis for creating some of music’s greatest moments; be it Axl and Slash, Mick and Keith or Lennon and McCartney, whilst within the realm of metal, artists teaming up has also led to some wonderful collaborative efforts in the form of projects like AYREON, BLOODBATH, PROBOT and AVANTASIA. One team-up that arguably nobody could have seen coming in 2018 however, is that between former TWISTED SISTER mouthpiece Dee Snider, and HATEBREED‘s Jamey Jasta yielding a strikingly heavy and guest appearance-filled record entitled For The Love Of Metal.
Upon first hitting play, things immediately hit the ground running with Lies Are a Business, a distinctly Painkiller-era JUDAS PRIEST like affair that maintains a relentlessly quick rhythmic pace upon which Dee Snider is able to bellow, snarl and roar his way across with gusto. It’s a surprisingly forceful start from the man most will associate with slightly lighter classic rock anthems, but one that ends up characterising much of the record. Tomorrow’s No Concern keeps the pace up, overflowing with a relentless punk spirit and showcasing the raw power of Dee Snider‘s vocals; whilst American Made is a chest-beating rager of a track that comes across almost FIVE FINGER DEATH PUNCH-esque in its sheer unashamed bombast.
Of course, one of the main draws of For the Love Of Metal is in its star-studded list of special guests. Across the record’s 12 tracks, metal fans will come across the likes of Howard Jones (LIGHT THE TORCH, ex-KILLSWITCH ENGAGE), Mark Morton (LAMB OF GOD), Alissa White-Gluz (ARCH ENEMY), Joel Grind and Nick Bellmore (TOXIC HOLOCAUST) and Charlie Bellmore (KINGDOM OF SORROW). Of these collaborations, most are at the very least fairly solid, but perhaps the most impactful is White-Gluz’s duet with Dee Snider on the anthemic power-ballad Dead Hearts (Love Thy Enemy), a track which sees the two play off of each other incredibly well, trading lines back and forth whilst a powerful guitar line chugs along in the background. Elsewhere, Howard Jones’ stint on The Hardest Way proves another winner as the pair’s voices not only work incredibly well in tandem, but the track also provides Jones with license for a proper metalcore breakdown to add a bit of much needed variance to the mix.
Herein lies the slight issue though, despite only clocking in at 42 minutes across 12 tracks, there’s a handful of moments here that come across as derivative of each other even within the context of the record. For every great track on For The Love Of Metal, it seems there’s another that’s simply either forgettable or should perhaps have been cut. Running Mazes is probably the worst offender in this regard, its riffing sounding like a worse version of something like Tomorrow’s No Concern, whilst also managing to hold an irritating and repetitive chorus hook that grates almost immediately, however it’s an issue also relevant to a song like Mask, which whilst not straight-up awful, simply sounds like a far lesser version of what surrounds it.
Closing things off on a high note though, luckily, is title-track For The Love Of Metal, a lumbering anthem of a track that couples yet more pacey chugging guitars and powerful lead vocals with some distinctly classic-metal sounding gang vocal chants to form maybe the album’s defining statement as evidenced by the mid-song rallying cry of “We are all fucking metal”. Dee Snider might have made his name producing much less heavier songs in his heyday, but it’s clear as the final notes fade out on this record that the man is very much an icon of the rock world for good reason, and one more than able to hang with modern bands and musical trends to this day.
On the whole, For The Love Of Metal is exactly what it says on the tin; a record produced by a pairing with a great deal of love and respect for the genre, whilst also proving to the wider community the versatility of a man still best known to most for cranking out hair-metal anthems in the 80s. And whilst there’s hardly anything groundbreaking to be found here, and not everything on the record seems to fully work, those moments that do are certainly more than enough to elevate this curious team-up from novelty to a fairly solid release. If this is the kind of direction that Dee Snider chooses to continue down in the future, things are looking pretty bright.
Rating: 7/10
For The Love of Metal is out now via Napalm Records.
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