Album review: Dee Snider – Leave A Scar

Let’s take a moment to stand back and salute the heavy rock lifer that is Mr. Dee Snider. Here’s a guy who spent the 1980s scoring hits with one of the MTV generation’s most notorious bands, Twisted Sister, dressed like a steroid-enhanced panto dame and scaring the bejesus out of ‘concerned’ parents. The school-wrecking anthems kept coming, but Dee – apparently – received no royalties for any of it.

A normal human might end up both broke and broken, but Dee simply sneered at everything in sight and redoubled his efforts. As Leave A Scar proves, he remains gloriously incapable of behaving like a 66-year-old and, perhaps most impressively, retains the alpha male roar that took him to fame in the first place. It’s a watertight follow-up to previous solo effort, 2018’s aptly titled For The Love Of Metal, in that it’s every bit as predictable, and every bit as banging.

As the frontman rages through cathartic post-lockdown stormers like I Gotta Rock (Again) and Down But Never Out, guitarists Charlie Bellmore and Nick Petrino stamp each track with metallic authority. Solos dogfight and riffs piledrive. On the one hand it all feels a touch rebranded and formulaic – but glam rock or radio friendly it ain’t. As if to underline Dee’s passion for metal, Time To Choose features vocal rumblings from George ‘Corpsegrinder’ Fisher, the man-mountain frontman of death metal loons Cannibal Corpse. It’s a mad collaboration that nevertheless succeeds, and it sits alongside the no less heavy In For The Kill, which adds a shot of metalcore to its stabbing hook.

So, despite dedicating a lifetime to this stuff, sometimes without reward, our man Snider remains both unrepentant and undiminished. It may be true about old dogs and new tricks, but Dee is still the OAP we all wanna be.

Verdict: 3/5

For fans of: Judas Priest, Ozzy Osbourne, Anthrax

Leave A Scar is out now via Napalm.

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