Sinner just keep going after forty years and now twenty albums, and yet they have never been a band I have really dug in on. Their output has always been uneven, wavering back and forth across the sometimes thin line between metal and rock, but they still get respect because of the good albums they have made and Matt Sinner's unquestionable dedication to music—he's been cranking in the underground since he was frigging 16.
As you'd expect, this album has some really good playing and some really solid riffs on it. Opener "Bulletproof" is a prime slice of headbanging fuel, and if the rest of the album was this bad ass, it would be a classic. But of course, it's not. Matt seems to have a terminally pop-rock taste in vocal melodies, especially on the choruses, and some songs like "Reach Out" or the title cut sound good until they get to the refrain and it's just too blues-rock to hold water. Sometimes they keep the hammers down and produce some good stuff like "Refuse to Surrender" or "The Man They Couldn't Hang", but pretty much everything that's being done here has been done better by other bands. Polished and very well played, but it doesn't go hard enough.
