Search - Sensation Junkies :: Once for the Money

My Energy Carries Voodoo...

linv | seattle | 10/05/2004

(5 out of 5 stars)

"This is a great album. The musicians are talented and play with mature restraint. At their best, they have a disjoint cool that smolders and occasionally flares into passion. Prime examples of this are "Urban Love Story" and "Painkiller".



The vocalist, Chrisopher Blue, has done time with a lot of good Seattle bands, notably Ten Minute Warning, a side project of ex G'N'R bassist, Duff McKagen. But The Junkies are no metal band and Blue doesn't need to growl or scream to get his message across. His singing on this record is a sort of tightwire act as he moves from tense verses to strong melodic choruses; brave choices for a singer who got his start with a more conventional soaring style of vocals.



The rest of the band are strong musicians who can represent a spectrum of styles convincingly. They play the bulk of the album "clean" and use distortion tastefully when needed. Perhaps the biggest surprise is "Basta!" which touches on samba without sounding fake. For those of you who like comparisons, the Sensation Junkies at times evoke Morphine.



But that is not to say they are derivative; they clearly have their own sound, which brings me to my one criticism, which is that the Junkies are occasionally unfocussed. They are good musicians with good ideas -- perhaps too many -- but they don't seem confident of which ideas best represent their sound. I suspect that an outside producer would solve this. But this is a small imperfection which the band will likely sort out as they continue to develop.



A knockout first record. Buy it."