Right, so sidestepping the whole “women in rock” shtick entirely, ‘The Strange Case Of…’ from Halestorm is the band’s second album, and where it manages to be consistent in it’s early stage, it’s not a terrible listen. The production is perfect to the point of being sickly, and at first, a range of hard rock influences are given equal time and attention underneath a classic balls out female rock vocal, but later things head downhill swiftly;
The ‘Black Parade’ My Chemical Romance-esque openers ‘Love Bites (So Do I)’ and ‘Mz Hyde’ open the album in a sort of cheese-filled-but-enjoyable way, but by the time the verse of ‘I Miss The Misery’ arrives, you start seeing glimpses of what ends up ruining the album. What happens is that the cracks in the fairly forced “hard bitch” moments at the start of the album begin to show that Lzzy Hale’s less of a home grown talent than a pop singer with a rock band, and the trio of ‘Beautiful With You’, ‘In Your Room’ and ‘Break In’ really need throwing in the bin / back end of an X Factor winner’s debut album.
The album doesn’t really quite recover from that poor middle section, with the back end of the album being fairly generic but not terrible All-American-Rock that would go down fine in a jager powered rock bar (as would the opening four-string salvo), before ‘Here’s To Us’ ends the album in another lazy ballad.
It’s a shame that ‘The Strange Case Of…’ falls apart so swiftly after the first four tracks – for all the very, very generic “dark rock” elements of the start, they were at least enjoyable and carried a very strong vocal. Notably, it’s also a shame to see a female fronted band lean on the “I’m a mean bitch, but only because my man left me”, mostly because it’s 2012 and we’re all better than that. The album ends up being a bit of a producer driven glossy sham, and worse than that – a waste of talent.
TOM AYLOTT