BELLGRAVE – My Soul Is My Gun

Looking at the cover of My Soul Is My Gun, with its Rambo-esque portrayal of twin sub-machine guns, one would expect to be “blown away” by its contents. While the music and musicianship isn’t horrible, there’s just not much to remember after spinning this release several times. The CD has a few interesting moments, but it just doesn’t have any lasting appeal after all fourteen tracks are heard.

The thing that will initially grab the attention of most listeners, is the gravelly, almost Lemmy Kilmister-like voice of vocalist “Danny.” At times the vocals on choruses sound very guttural, and lyrical parts are occasionally delivered via shouting versus being sung. Listeners will most likely decide after hearing Danny whether this band is for them or not. Razor-sharp guitars are played aplenty and tend to sound grungy and replete with distortion. For the most part, each song contains a guitar solo, nothing that can be called guitar histrionics; they are more obligatory at best. The guitar solos really provide very little value to the overall feel behind the songs.

The few bright spots include “Cold Bleeding Angel,” with a nice guitar melody driving the refrain leading into the chorus. One can only imagine why the production team decided to start the release with a 10 second snippet of this track’s guitar line, that fades in then fades out. The title track, “My Soul Is My Gun,” has a respectable chorus driven by a head banging guitar riff.

Some deja vu moments include “P(r)ay and P(r)ay,” which contains a chorus with an echo that might remind you at times of something Rob Zombie might have already done. The track “When Rats Leave The Ship” borrows slightly from Rammstein by delivering part of the lyrics in a spoken German manner over a bobbing bass line. Then comes “One Hour” where the band seems to use every vocal effect in the grunge handbook (e.g., distortion, megaphone, whispering, etc.).

The music on this release is best characterized as a mediocre soundtrack suitable for a local mosh pit, but in the end, there’s just too much “been there, done that” to be a recommended buy. Given this statement, it’s odd that the band decided to include tracks entitled “Things Called Never Changed” and “With No Compromise.”