Skid Row – Rise of the damnation army – United world rebellion: Chapter 2

Skid Row have released the second of three EPs that make up United World Rebellion. The first part was released last year, and the third part is still to come.  It’s an interesting idea, releasing three EPs instead of one album, and does mean that while each release is shorter than a full album, the releases are more frequent.  It also fits in around the band’s heavy touring schedule as they can spend less time in the studio to do an EP than would be needed for an album, so shorter gaps between tours.

On this EP there are seven tracks – five new songs plus two covers.  The two covers are “Sheer heart attack” (Queen) and “Rats in the cellar” (Aerosmith).  The first thing I have to say about the EP is that it’s good – it’s really good in fact.

The EP kicks off with “We are the damned”, a great hard hitting song that is as good as anything we saw from the early days of Skid Row and which features some great vocals from Johnny Solinger.

We then move on to “Give it the gun”, another hard and fast rock song.

“Catch the fall” slows things down – it’s the almost mandatory rock ballad, and it’s probably the weakest track here.  It’s still good, just not as good as the rest of the tracks.

“Damnation army” sees the band getting back to more hard rock, and its a damn good track.

“Zero day” is the last of the new material.  The vocals here do remind me of Sebastian Bach – but Seb as he used to be rather than the somewhat erratic singer he is these days.  It’s a great performance from Johnny Salinger.

I particularly like the Queen cover – “Sheer heart attack”.  They’ve done a superb job with it.  Johnny Solinger’s vocals work really well, and the music sounds nice and heavy too.  It’s a great song and a perfect choice for Skid Row to cover.

The Aerosmith cover is very good too. There’s a nice guitar solo in it, and the song has been given a really heavy sound – unless you know the original then you wouldn’t recognise it as an Aerosmith song from listening to it as Skid Row have really done a great job with the cover.

“Rise of the damnation army – United world rebellion: Chapter 2” is out now and is definitely highly recommended.

Track listing:

1. We are the damned
2. Give it the gun
3. Catch the fall
4. Damnation army
5. Zero day
6. Sheer heart attack
7. Rats in the cellar