Label: Atomic Fire Records
Release date: July 15, 2022
Production: Mat Sinner
Album length: 53.22 min
Genre: Heavy Metal
Rating: 8.5/10
Today, Sinner count as one of the longest-running German heavy rock and heavy metal outfits around. The band’s boss, driving engine, visionary, main songwriter, producer, vocalist and bassist Mat Sinner has long since become a kind of icon, especially on the German metal scene. Anyone who follows these things even a little will tell you that Mat Sinner has never hidden his strong Thin Lizzy inspiration. In fact, that inspiration colors most of the band’s career. But Sinner have also put out some seriously hard, metal-sharpened records. What springs to mind above all is the run of studio albums between 1997 and 2003.
After “There Will Be An Execution” (2003), Sinner kept the releases coming, but their sound swung back to a heavy rock vibe inspired by the elements of the seventies rock tradition. Mat Sinner hit the jackpot with Primal Fear, and the focus on the original band, Sinner, got smaller and smaller. It honestly seemed like we’d never get another album with a production as ferocious and metal-sharpened as the unforgettable “The Nature Of Evil” (1998).
After a few odd maneuvers, especially bringing in a female vocalist, and another pretty mediocre record in “Santa Muerte” (2019, RockLine review), it looked like Sinner no longer deserved any attention and that the band had done its job, or rather that Primal Fear remained Mat Sinner’s first priority and Sinner just his house band. Wrong. Compared to everything Sinner have released since 2003, “Brotherhood” is a real beast. On “Brotherhood,” Sinner have made a radical about-face, both in musical direction and in production. This is an album that plugs right back into “There Will Be An Execution” and then some. Even “The Nature Of Evil.”
Tom Naumann’s guitar phrases haven’t sounded this bristling, ‘sly’ and ‘nasty’ in ages, and the same goes for Matt Sinner’s vocal delivery. The phrasing is snarling, heartfelt and relentless like nothing we’ve heard in almost twenty years. Sinner’s love for Thin Lizzy shows up in the rousing title track and in the closing, mellow 40 Days And 40 Nights, the latter mostly because of his vocal approach. “Brotherhood” is a pleasingly venomous, generously jagged heavy metal album cranked up in decibels. Neo-classical, Judas Priest-inspired three-part harmonies take center stage again, accompanying the ‘sharpened’ phrasing and giving the album both musical and atmospheric completeness. “The Brotherhood” is an album that speaks through pronounced drama theater and pomp. And at moments it’s intensely dark. Even the track placement is a bit reminiscent of the days of “The Nature Of Evil.” It opens with the ferociously sharp Bulletproof (the relentless The Man They’ve Couldn’t Hang could just as well have been picked as the opener), then in the middle there’s the seven-and-a-half-minute, hugely ambitious composition The Last Generation, full of mood and motif shifts, with an extended guitar duel in its closing stretch, which recalls the title track of that classic Sinner album mentioned a moment ago. And, as noted, right at the tail end sits a calmer number, 40 Days And 40 Nights, just like The Sun Goes Down, the Thin Lizzy cover that closes “The Nature Of Evil.”
There’s no filler on the new album either, which means the crew found a great creative groove when writing the material, and it shows a newly found freshness. Mat Sinner has cunningly dressed up some of the songs with orchestrations and extra keyboards, and beefed up the vocal harmonies too. That’s almost routine for Mat Sinner, but this time these ‘extras’ grab you atmospherically like they haven’t in a long time. With its bristling phrasing in the production and contrasting rhythmic stampede, “Brotherhood,” the 20th studio album in total from these great German elders of metal, is a real ‘metal torpedo’ brewed from the best that the tradition of the German school of heavy metal has to offer. May it stay that way.
Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Track list:
1. Bulletproof
2. We Came To Rock
3. Reach Out
4. Brotherhood
5. Refuse To Surrender
6. The Last Generation
7. Gravity
8. The Man They Couldn’t Hang
9. The Rocker Rides Away
10. My Scars
11. 40 Days 40 Nights
Line-up:
Mat Sinner – vocals, bass guitar
Tom Naumann – guitar
Alex Scholpp – guitar
Markus Kullmann – drums
Guest musicians:
Dave Ingram, Erik Martensson, Giorgia Colleluori, Lisa Müller, Mark Basile, Neil Witchard, Oliver Palotai, Ralf Scheepers, Ronnie Romero, Sascha Krebs, Stef E., Tom Englund
