Album Review : Antihero - The Bronx Casket Co. 8*

FFO : Anthrax, Rammstein

The Bronx CasketCo., have a really good solid metal sound and a style that sets them somewhere close to Rammstein's crossover industrial in the great genre naming game.

The title track opens the album and it is a beast of a song, a burly and strapping riff and pounding drums, atmospheric keyboards introduce some lightness into the rhythmic deluge, and the chorus bellow provided by D D Verni (in his part time job away from Overkill) is an awesome and catchy chant. Bonesaw keeps up a similar tempo and TBCC again demonstrate some deft touches with carefully introduced pauses and fleeting moments of quietness.

Just over half the album then is packed with thundering industrial metal and is well worth shelling out on, the other half has been given over to some too familiar cover versions, of which, Alice Cooper's Let Me Be Your Nightmare is the pick of the bunch with heavier guitar parts and menacing vocals, whilst playing Queen's Death On Two Legs only serves to remind that TBCC are not Freddie and Brian.  My Way, with its generic everyman lyrics beloved of funeral parlours and karaoke bars is a song so tired it should be in bed by teatime, but saying that, of all the myriad versions of this song I have heard, this would easily make the My Way Top 20.

If you were thinking of buying the album, perhaps you'd be better paying for the tracks individually, buy the original tracks, which are worth the 8* rating, and you'll enjoy some seriously stirring metal, but the covers are a bit lame.