Strictly Diesel – Sandra Gilraine

Strictly Diesel
Roadrunner Records, 1998
Reviewed by Sandra Gilraine
Published on Feb 22, 2002

I’ve always had a taste for the harder side of music, so when an
acquaintance recommended the band Spineshank, I promptly headed out
to the nearst music supplier and bought Spineshanks’ first album
Strictly Diesel, released in 1998 on Roadrunner Records.
Upon first listen, I was not impressed. Harsh drum beats, power
chord guitar riffs and electronic bleeps add a certain something to
the general feel of this powerhouse quartet, but this album as a
whole hasn’t jumped out at me as THE underground metal album of the
current era.

Granted this does seem to be an experimental album for the band,
and from the research I’ve done on the band, there wasn’t a single
released from the album that was really pushed. They had a few
small mentions in
Kerrang! magazine but they quickly fell into the melee of
another one of “those” bands. Jonny Santos’ vocals are of the
quality that switching quickly and constantly from gutteral
screaming and howling to full-vocaled note-holding without so much
as a crack, but Santo’s vocals are drowned out by Souren “Mike”
Sarkisyan’s Guitar riffs. The perfect tone in the songs seems the
complimenting bass riffs dealt out by Rob Garcia, and harmonize
with the guitar and vocals brilliantly. Tom Decker’s drum fills and
electronic sampling add the perfect amount of new-age-feel to the
music, which in itself separates it from the mass of bands trying
to make it big in recent years in this genre.

The most powerful song on the album is “Where We Fall”, and
probably the only one I’ll so much as tap my foot along to. Santos’
vocals dominate the song, and as well they should. There’s minimal
gutteral wailing, and more flowing straight-from-the-stomach
singing, which is certainly what I appreciate most. “Where We Fall”
stands out from the rest of the songs, the guitars are different
from the average three-power-chord songs and the lyrics are about
someone else for a change, instead of describing how black the
lyricist always feels inside.

The worst song is Spineshank’s rendition of “While My Guitar
Gently Weeps”. I assure you, there is no gentle weeping happening
in this cover, they might as well have renamed the classic Beatles
tune “While My Cat Painfully Dies”. The song is a disgrace to the
original, and has gone beyond experimentation, it’s just pure
brutality.

Are Spineshank likely to become a top ten of hard-metal? Not
likely, unless they learned a hard lesson from the feedback of the
release of
Strictly Diesel.

Rating: C

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