Luck of the Draw: Hellbound Hayride, Dirty Power, "Demons"

By Lucky DiPalma

“Who Shot the Hole in My Sombrero?” : Hellbound Hayride
(Split Seven Records)

I’ve heard this third release by Hellbound described as “their best album to date”. Not so much that it’s got a ton of great new material – only a few newer tracks and a couple of standards like Folsom Prison Blues – but that it’s their first album that actually “sounds” good. Recorded live 2002 at the Doll Hut in Anaheim, the sound quality is almost surprisingly good. (Perhaps more bands ought to consider doing the same?) Anyhow, if you’ve ever stumbled upon one of their live sets, this is pretty much what you would expect to hear, although as an album, it’s about 5 or 6 songs too long to listen to straight through. Overall, it’s somewhat of a mixed bag: there’s a handful of tunes that are easily fast-forward material, but then there’s a couple that, in classic Hellbound style, definitely fall into the “blazing down the road in the middle of the night with your hair on fire” category, if ya know what I mean….

***
Three Stars, borrow it from one of your friends
(Shhhh…I did not just say that! Support the scene!)

Dirty Power : Dirty Power
(Dead Teenager)

With more guitar riffs than you can shake a stick at, this debut album featuring members of Pansy Division would make the folks at Guitar Center proud. These boys obviously mean business. And the production quality is quite good, I admit. But maybe I will just never be able to fully embrace “metal nouveau” - the high-tops and big hair quality to their sound is quite unpalateable. If you’re an older metal fan, or you have embraced the metal revival, you might like this, but even then don’t be disappointed if none of the songs live up to their hard rockin’ anthem-esque potential. They’ve been called the new AC/DC, but I can’t for the life of me figure out why; their publicist probably came up with that one.

**
Two Stars, it’s just “ok”

“Demons” : Stockholm Slump
(Gearhead Records)

As an album, this second release by “Demons” succeeds in living up to it slovenly moniker, and the boys from Sweden fail to live up to the fury that their hellish one implies. OK, I’m sure at the time they probably thought that title was a pretty funny play on words, but isn’t that just setting yourself up for disaster in case your second release should, in fact, suck? The big buzz around this release promised a greasy maelstrom of dragstrip debauchery, but it never fully delivers (see the Hellbound review if that’s what you’re looking for). Each song drones into one identical song after the next; variations on a theme, but without the variations (and the theme was only ho-hum to begin with). Although their first release Riot Salvation also suffered from this same misfortune, there is a real high-energy potential that comes through on both, so I can imagine they rip it up a bit better live.

**
Two Stars, it’s just “ok”