In days gone by, I
have myself written press releases, heck, I’ve even taught
others how to write them but I could willingly never read
another single hyperbolic piece of gibberish again as long
as I live. This is in no way a swipe at neither Bride nor
their record label, both of whom clearly have to attempt to
win the punters (and indeed people like myself) over. That
said, Bride’s new CD is not genuinely, “highly anticipated,”
nor was their Snakes in the Playground platter worthy of the
epithet, “legendary.” Whether it constitutes, “possibly the
best work that Bride has ever recorded!” is again open to
debate.
If the art of being
truthful was to be dropped into the advertising world, then
I would suspect that the words being used to describe Skin
for Skin would include, “competent,” “average,” or
“alright.” If we were feeling particularly harsh we could
even go on to say something along the lines of, “not much to
write home about,” or what about, “a bit uninspired,” or
perhaps, “nothing you haven’t heard a million times
before.”
Possibly the (best)
most intriguing aspect of this CD is how much on occasions
Dale Thompson sounds like Wednesday 13 in terms of his vocal
inflection and paralinguistic features. This is intriguing
in particular because Bride are Christian metallers and to my
perverse mind the 13 comparison is somewhat amusing. The
greatest example of this is on End of Days which honestly
had me reaching for the inlay card to say if the erstwhile Muderdoll was making a somewhat strange guest appearance.
Skin for Skin is not
by any means a bad record, lyrically there’s obviously a lot
of thought gone into things and for that alone it should be
applauded but musically there’s not very much to grab on to
and when taking a trip through the reviewing process I had
to force myself to listen to it. At no point did I think to
myself, “Wow, I’m going to get down with Bride today and
really enjoy it!” Unfortunately, I didn’t feel any better
after any of my listening sessions which suggests that if I
were looking to spend my hard earned cash on something –
this would not be the one.
Simon Bray
