Style: heavy metal, hard rock
Label: n/a
Year: 2021
Home: California
Members: Sara Baldwin ~ vocals
n/a ~ instruments
Is this hard rock? Heavy metal? Pat Benatar or Lita Ford? I'm so not sure what this album is going for, other than out the door I'm hearing crunchy distorted thumping metal guitars with a female singer who is pretty good. Its fine, but something feels off. Something is missing the mark. As the songs pass by I never shake the feeling. Then I come to the conclusion that Sara, the vocalist, is in the wrong gig. She can sing, no doubt, but as a metal singer she has no bite, no emotion, nothing other than an ability to hit the notes. Maybe she likes metal, but just because you like something doesn't mean its the right fit for you. I love metal, but as a bassist I don't play much of it as I like playing other styles better. One the things musicians routinely fail at is knowing what works for them & what doesn't. One need only look at musicians who were huge, fell off the charts, changed their sound to fit in with trends & had a huge backlash from fans. Motley Crue doing grunge wasn't their thing, no matter how good they pulled it off. It's like asking Al Pacino to play a 12 year old in his next movie. Its doesn't work no matter how much make-up is used. Nice try, but let's move on & say this didn't happen & grow from the experiment. Sara is in the same boat, wasting her singing on the metal style. It neither fits well, nor seems to give her anything to work with as a singer. She's not adding to the songs, nor sounding particularly inspired by the music. When she does some random guttural screaming it comes off as forced & not at all something she's practiced & refined as an alternative voice she's comfortable using. It basically screams, "See, I can sing metal if I do this." I can sing with a good vibrato, but I'm not promoting myself as an opera singer. Because you do can part of something, doesn't mean you're actually doing something, unless you're hacking it ... which essentially is what this album feels like: the hack approach to metal. Not to mention, the random growling just comes out of the blue feeling tacked on. It basically feels like Sara &/or the production team had a checklist of heavy metal traits & needed the growling to check another box. Essentially, the hack approach to making music. The result is like watching two jazz guitarists doing a concert with no other musicians, but neither are listening or playing off of each other. At that point its just free jazz, but free jazz requires even more listening then normal, so it just fails as anything but an embarrassing gig. I almost imagine a producer in the studio telling Sara how to sing, but to such an extent he never lets her feel the music & actually sing. The hack approach to singing is to hit the notes perfect. The singer's approach is to feel the notes & maybe not always hit them perfect. One reason I got this visual of the producer is because I can't believe a singer would use as many special effects on her voice as she does. Any emotion that might be found here, which isn't much, is just sucked out the window with that addition. The tweaking of the voice constantly says to me there's a voice here that shouldn't be heard as she can't sing, or there's just
something wrong & the producers thought tweaking would fix it. Well, Sara's voice sounds good & she really hits the few ballads great. So, why ruin her voice? She obviously has the skill if not the emotion. The rights songs can bring on that emotion. So, I'm guessing the producers know something is wrong with the album & think her voice is it. Its not. Its the producers. The music is bad, the lyrics boring, the riffs completely cliched, the music over-stuff. The whole thing is a checklist, so no wonder something sounds off. It sounds uninspired from the first note. Which says to me these are lousy producers. They had a vision of a success metal album. Sara is along for the ride, as its not about her. The studio effects killed the one thing that could make this album be different or give this any soul. The fact they killed the good part shows they are like the jazz guitarists: not listening. Now, I could be completely wrong. Maybe this is all Sara, her vision, her production. It sounds far too polished for someone coming out the door on their second album for me to believe that. So, I believe this is a producer's con-job. In the end, No Turning Back it is all things at once & yet nothing; bombing under its own weight stinking of manufactured music for commercial success & not metal for metalheads. This is metal for college kids who think Green Day invented punk or Five Finger Death Punch is the greatest metal band ever. For those that think I'm arrogant suggesting a different
style of music. I've made this suggestion before - see Leslie DiNicola who I've reviewed on this blog. She ended up taking my advice going from blues-rock to country. Guess whose career exploded? I'd be happy to list other musicians who took my advice & found bigger success with what I suggested, including one who got a gig with the former producer of Led Zeppelin but previously couldn't get on anybody's radar. So, I'm suggesting dump the metal & try for a different type of rock. Maybe something
more alternative like Garbage or Icky's Ego, the later who I've reviewed here. Something raw, maybe quirky, emphasis on vocals, slashing guitars. While, please, please, dump the vocal effects. Metal is raw. Thus, be raw. Metal is emotional. Thus, don't tweak away the emotion, as there's nothing emotional in auto-tune. There's only one Sara Baldwin, so when I listen to her album I want to hear her, not a computer & her trying to be someone else.
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