A one-sentence review of Sick N’ Beautiful’s Horror Vacui (BLKIIBLK Records) is easy: What if Rob Zombie was a woman?
Horror, Shock, whatever kind of Rock you wanna call it, this album fills the hole in my soul made when Davey Suicide stopped making records.
From the Alice Cooper-esque guitar shreds opening the eminently karaoke-able “Human Is) Overrated” to the samples ending “Diggity Dig Dig,” every song is a banger, and if I ever get to see them live, I am certain it’ll be as much fun as the Zombie/Cooper show last fall, or the Davey Suicide show in 2023.
As much as Thrash feeds my soul, this stuff makes me shit-eating-grin happy.
“My Wounds” features the full Industrial side to the genre, with different vocal filters, samples, and full-throated hollering of the title in the chorus. And “Death Police,” besides featuring a blistering guitar solo, has one of the most fun bridges I’ve had the joy of screaming along to – “Freeze / Don’t move / Hands behind your back” repeated a bunch of times, before climaxing with near Death Metal vocals.
The album’s first single, “Haunted” shows off Herma’s Doro Pesch-like power, while allowing LOR1 to show off another nifty guitar solo. While I’m not going to try to cover every track, “Hate Manifesto” has got to be the sing-a-long champ of this collection. It almost feels engineered for that purpose. To close this part out, let me say “The Rat King” is ludicrously fun.
Being involved with a Metal fan group or two on Facebook keeps me in the loop as new genres pop up and different bands-of-the-week get hate and love and then fall to the background noise of the greatest music scene around.
Meanwhile, Rob Zombie and Alice Cooper continue to draw thousands year in and year out. This genre, this music style, this fun morbid-lyrics-abound Rock ‘N Roll that Sick N’ Beautiful perform with such gusto and energy, it will never get old or fail to make new fans.
Being based in Italy makes it so much less likely that I’m ever going to get to see these guys, but if they ever get stateside, I’ll be at the front of that line.
Buy the album here:
https://ffm.to/sicknbeautifulhv
8 / 10
LARRY ROGERS
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