Danger Zone

This really is a pleasant surprise. Sometimes with an album, the combination of songs, energy and production make it stand out in a CD collection. Well, that is exactly what has happened with 'Danger Zone'. The style of the album is straight ahead early/mid 80s metal with a heavy dose of Judas Priest combined with the NWOBHM grit of early Saxon. The energy of Danger Zone is so infectious; you can tell the guys in the band were very young at the time it was recorded.

The first song, and title track, "Danger Zone" reveals Mat Sinners love of Thin Lizzy with some excellent harmonized guitar passages and a catchy chorus. Mat's voice is raw and it fits very well with the style of music that Sinner play. "Scene of the Crime" is a fast paced monster with another chorus that you will be singing for days and "Lupo Manaro" slows things down with some mid-tempo no nonsense head banging material. Another neck snapper "Wild Things" rears its head near the end of the album. The songwriting does leave a bit to be desired in places and sometimes the band does tread the same ground in different songs, but the album does flow well from start to finish.

The production of the album is very good, to my ears. The drum sound is almost identical to Dave Hollands on Judas Priest's 'Defenders of the Faith' and has a slightly mechanical feel to them. The guitars though, are far ballsier here and sit nicely in the mix with plenty of mid crunch. In fact, this album has one of my preferred hard rock/heavy metal guitar sounds from the 80s era. A fine example of this is in the intro of Lupo Manaro.

This is the perfect album when you have had a few beers, just want to turn your stereo up loudly and enjoy no frills hard rock/ heavy metal. I would take this album over just about any other for that. It should not really be judged by each song on its own merits, rather as a whole. It has the feel of a live performance and does what 80s metal should. It makes you feel alive! It is a shame that as the 80s progressed, Sinner adopted a more commercial American influenced sound that didn't really suit the band. Fortunately in the mid 90s, Sinner decided to get heavy and started releasing mammoth metal albums with disgracefully good production.

Well Boris pretty much nailed this one I think, but c'mon now, only ONE review up for this? And worse yet - as of this writing - a tiny FOUR reviews up for this band's entire discography, all written by the same person?? Absurd. Something needs to be done, and being the major fanboy on this site around Mat Sinner's later band Primal Fear, after some three and a half years of wait that task might as well fall upon me.

I'll keep this review relatively short and simple, because what we have here can be pretty much described as a sampler of random 80's metal...like Boris said, there are few surprises here. Simple, straightforward, catchy and accessible no-nonsense heavy fucking metal, with an in-your-face headbanging groove similar to that of Accept and much of NWOBHM. Then a little of that bump and sass from Mötley Crüe's second album, minus the glam, and then some riffs and rhythms that remind of Dokken at their very heaviest. The production is somewhat reminiscent of 'Defenders of the Faith', though more low-budget as one can expect, but still quite solid and energetic all-around.

Clearly the band's heart is in the right place here, but the songwriting is just a little too samey and derivative for me to place it alongside timeless classics such as 'Balls to the Wall', or the aforementioned 'Defenders of the Faith' and 'Shout at the Devil' - yes, even some fourteen years before Primal Fear (as much as I love them), Mat Sinner's songwriting at times suffered from being somewhat generic. No real identity is forged in their sound and thus most of the album blurs together and does not manage to stand out in any really major way. So, how Boris puts this one above that unstoppable juggernaut of a Priest classic from the same year is entirely beyond me, but nonetheless it's quite a fun ride for what it is. If you want 80's metal...you totally fucking got it.

The highlight on here is far and away the title track - for lack of a more clever way to sum it up, this song just fucking RULES! Imagine the general melody and atmosphere of Iron Maiden's "Twilight Zone", but with a "Two Minutes to Midnight" guitar rhythm (that's actually an issue I have with the whole album - as much as this rhythm is classic and widely used in all of metal, it is used far too fucking often on here!), with Accept actually playing the song. Oh yes, and with cheesy keyboards typical for 1984 thrown in. I for one absolutely adore them, but then you have to know I really dig bands like Autograph, if you know/remember them (they had precisely one hit in "Turn Up the Radio" from their debut album, also released in 1984 - other L.A. bands were cheesier, but none had more keyboards than these guys!). In any case, on here they are used tastefully to give the song an added element of emotion and "depth", and in the chorus, the whole "80's effect" of this is just brutal!

"It's a long way through the dark, through the Danger Zone!"

Fuck yeah!!! Furthermore, the lead work here is nothing short of incredible, especially that little lead/riff just after the first chorus, before the solo. Other highlights include the mid-paced "No Place in Heaven" with its shout-out, fist raising chorus (and "Seek and Destroy" opening riff popping up out of nowhere after the second chorus, what the fuck?! Ahh, but no complaint, it's a great riff after all), the namesake "Fast, Hard & Loud" (featuring a really piss-poor imitation of Rob Halford's trademark majestic high-pitch wailing in the chorus, that still somehow manages to sound really cool) and the energetic "Rattlesnake", hinting at Mötley Crüe with its "sassy" vocals and lyrics.

I've only had this album for a couple of weeks now, and usually I give albums longer time than that before reviewing them, but there's really no need for that here. This is a type of album that is not only easily gotten into, but also one utilizing a style that anyone even remotely into metal should recognize immediately, meaning there's nothing here that requires time to "get used to" or anything. Again, it is largely without surprises, but that doesn't have to be a bad thing. It's true that I always say that albums that take more time to grow on you usually hold more staying power - accordingly, I probably will grow out of this one faster than with, say, Hibria's fantastic debut album (aside from the title track, but that is not to say I won't be pulling the rest of it out again after laying it off for maybe a year). Still, however, I'd rather have this than any of the countless far more sophisticated albums that will NEVER grow on me, like all of Opeth's works (whoa, I'm actually bashing Opeth? In a review for classic heavy metal?? Shit, I better slow down the originality train here before hurting someone!). Aside from the most obvious of selections (Iron Maiden, Judas Priest), I could barely think of a safer purchase for the average heavy metal fan.

In conclusion - highly recommended. Noise records recently re-issued it (not with fancy new re-packaging or anything, but still), so you should be able to find it around.