Album Review: Sinner - Santa Muerte

Sinner has always been a boring band to me. I've listened to a few of their albums, and I've never come away impressed by anything I heard. They are the very definition of 'meat and potatoes', which isn't a bad thing, but it is rather bland. So it's a bit weird that after so many years, and so many albums, the band went and did something many people would call a gimmick; added a female singer alongside Mat Sinner. I'm not sure I buy the explanation that he was so blown away by her that he needed to add her to his band. Scrapping a group's identity after decades isn't something you do on a whim. And when you factor in there are also guest vocals from Ricky Warwick and Ronnie Romero, this whole thing starts to feel awfully contrived.

I'm also a bit uneasy about a German man putting out an album called "Santa Muerte", featuring a song called "Fiesta Y Copas", which includes some lyrics in Spanish. It could all be genuine, but it also has the appearance of cultural appropriation. Since his last album was titled "Tequila", maybe he's drank so much of the stuff he thinks he's part of that culture. I don't know, but I wish he would have found a different route to go down.

What I find weird about this record is how it's put together. Now that the group has a second vocalist, I was expecting Mat and Giorgia to share duties within each song, sort of like the Kiske/Somerville albums Mat had a part in putting together. Rather than that, however, the entire first half of the record is essentially divided up with one singing lead, and the other barely there. It doesn't make any sense to me.

When they do share vocals on "Last Exit To Hell", it makes for a far more interesting sound than the standard Sinner approach. There's more layers and nuance as their voices trade off then blend. That's what I wanted to hear, and we aren't given enough of it for my liking. Sinner finally finds something that works, and they ignore it until the last third of the album. Actually, Mat does exactly that on "What Went Wrong", but it's with Ricky Warwick. Again, why?

So why am I talking so much about the singers and their roles? Mainly because there isn't much to talk about when it comes to the songs. They are standard Sinner fare, which means they are basic hard rock that we've all heard a thousand times before. This time, there's a bit more Black Star Riders vibe with the guitar harmonies (I wonder just how much time Mat spent with Ricky, and whether there's more to the story than a guest vocal), but the entire Black Star Riders deal is aping the Thin Lizzy legacy, so it's still rather trite.

I have to say "Santa Muerte" is a frustrating album. Nothing about it feels like the work of a band with an identity. On a fundamental level, I don't understand what was going through Mat's mind when he constructed an album that is so inconsistent on a vocal level. Maybe he was tired of doing the same thing again and again, but there had to be a better way of doing something new than this. "Santa Muerte" doesn't hold together even if the songs were better, so it's hard to say this is worth listening to. I would say just track down the song "Misty Mountain", and ignore the rest.