Injun

Belladonna
Belladonna
1995

As you've no doubt heard by now, Joey Belladonna has joined Anthrax for the third time. On the one hand, I feel like the revolving door lineup this band has is really pathetic and they should really consider hanging it up. On the other hand, I fucking love Belladonna-era Anthrax, so if they're gonna keep chugging along, I'd just assume it be with him up front instead of John Bush (who I never liked with Anthrax or Armored Saint) or Dan Nelson (who sounded a little too Phil Anselmo for my tastes, in the little bit that I heard of his voice). Once, before Nelson joined, there were rumors that former Ugly Kid Joe frontman Whitford Crane was going to join, and I have to admit I was sort of jazzed at that prospect. But that was forever ago.

At any rate, I hope they get some new music out there soon, and I hope it smokes, and I hope Belladonna's voice sounds great, and Charlie writes some crushing riffs, and they cool it with the groovy hard rock bullshit they were doing by the end with Bush. I want a killer return to form from these guys. Bad.

But enough of that shit. Here's Joey's solo debut from 1995, a relatively limp record that is still better than most of the Bush-era Anthrax stuff. When this starts, you're gonna be like, "oh yeah, here we go." The opening drums are big and beefy and sound like shit's gonna be all up in your face. But the guitar tone is oddly hollow, and most of the songs are too slow. It was 1995 after all. But anyway, it's a neat artifact, and some of it's pretty good I guess. Also there are song titles like "Power Trip", "Rob You Blind", "Two Faced" and "Mixed Emotions". I guess you could call this Joey's breakup album.

If nothing else I should get plenty of hits on the ol' blog here for people doing google searches for "Belladonna". You know who I'm talking about.

Belladonna