Sister
Stand Up, Forward, March!
(Metal Blade Records)
Glam-fueled sleaze merchants Sister have been at it for just over a decade now, mining the ground first tilled by Hanoi Rocks and fellow Swedes Backyard Babies. And I’ll come clean here. I’ve always had a jones for the sleazed-up, dirty hard rock that flew largely under the radar of the hairband days – MTVs last gasp, if you would. In those days, my True Metal ™ playlist was supplemented by Dogs D’Amour, Dangerous Toys, Bang Tango and Asphalt Ballet.
Sister are also disciples of dirt, and “Destination Dust” is a rumbling, tumbling, drunk-stumbling leadoff track, but here’s where things go downhill. Rapidly. “Lost In Line” smacks of the industro-lite attempted by Swedes-gone-Hollywood Shotgun Messiah when they tried to “get hard” and failed. Sadly, it doesn’t get any better, “Carry On” being a clunker of nearly epic proportions, vocalist Jamie Anderson moaning and grunting his way through preschool rhymes like “It will take time to recover, I’ll do my best to discover”, the rest of the band making WASP’s “Forever Free” sound like “Stairway To Heaven” in the process. While I had hopes for “Dead Man’s Dirt” and its standard boogie-woogie, blues, Anderson again proves the bad apple in this bunch, and I think therein lies the issue with much of why Sister makes even the third-tier “born to the bargain bin” bands from the glory days of the style seem second-tier by comparison. Whatever effect the vocalist seems married to actually mars what would be otherwise at least passable hard rock, turning the final song title into the best review that could possibly be given.
Stand Up, Forward, March! falls on its face, and is, truly, a “Piece Of Shame.”
