BRAND NEW SIN - Sin City Syracuse Or Bust!
by Martin Popoff
Syracuse, New York isn't exactly known as a hotbed of pork rib rock off the grill, but Brand New Sin have long been serving up heart attack burgers of munchable he-man metal, last heard back on that first Down album, sorta livin' it in the grooves of BLS and COC. And now that the clichˇs have been dealt and dispensed with, it's time to hear from the Danny Joe Brown of our age, Joe Altier, on how Brand New Sin rose from label hell (one bankrupt, one jerking the band around endlessly) to arrive on Century Media with a hells a' poppin' groovy beer-drinking metal classic called Recipe For Disaster.
"I think the biggest thing that's happened between the first record and this record is the maturity of us," begins Joe, "not so much as people (laughs), but definitely as a band - we've come a long way. The songwriting, and how we deal with our live show, that just comes with being together in a van for a year and a half and touring. And I think when we approached this record, we just had a much better idea of what we wanted to accomplish. We've just matured. A lot of the last record, where I was coming from at least, was very personal, inside of me, the demons I had been battling, prior to the record. But this one, with all that we've gone through between being on Now Or Never, going to the next label, and then finally ending up at Century Media, it was going through utter hell, wondering if our career was ever going to get going again. So a lot of things in this record were really about perseverance, about being very angry and very depressed about the situation we were in. There was a time when... I mean, we wrote 70 friggin' songs for the record, and demoed like crazy, only to have them to tell us that it wasn't good enough. So there was a lot of frustration. We knew that we were going to persevere, because in the end, we knew that we were creating something special, something that everyone deserves to hear some day. That was the inspiration more than anything."
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