Dollar-Sent
Dollar-Sent LP
The first thing that comes to mind after a few seconds of listening to the opening track of this album is one word – Motorhead. Blistering guitars, full-throttle rhythm section, and a rabid belter of a singer. This band aims to recreate the neck-breaking vigour of Motorhead’s ‘Ace of Spades’, making you wonder if Dollar-Sent are in fact a well-practised tribute band that suddenly came up with some tunes of their own.
While guitarists have always been ok to copy their predecessors, people have continually been harsher on vocalists who try to carbon-copy their forerunners. All you have to do is remember the cruel panning that Lenny Wolf of Kingdom Come got for trying to sound like Robert Plant on ‘What Love Can Be’. He was called a Plant-wannabe not only by critics and music fans but by fellow rock stars, and remained branded exactly that for the rest of his career, even though the greater part of his material sounded nothing like Plant.
I just hope that Chris Rizzanski, the singer of Dollar-Sent will avoid this fate. While underground scene fans may enjoy what he does, once the band hits big time (and this could happen), critics and peers could suddenly become ruthless toward someone who aims to sound exactly like an iconic star.
What makes this debut a further disappointment is the unavoidable fact that the songs on the album are repetitive, exploiting Motorhead’s legacy as a source for songwriting and style. To break this stylistic and compositional repetitiveness, the band sometimes introduces industrial-sounding breaks and echo effect on the vocals, but this tactic still doesn’t make a radical difference to the style that Dollar-Sent have settled for far too comfortably and far too early in their career and one which they do not seem to able to depart from.
To top it all off, there is not enough material on this record to qualify for a proper album, as the last two tracks are live versions of ‘Mess of Me’ and ‘Girl from St. Mary’s’, bringing the number of original tracks on this album down to six.
An obvious conclusion is that Dollar-Sent are in dire need of originality in terms of execution and composition. While they show ability and determination, the band should have waited to release an album not only until they had enough tunes but until they had something to say that is their own, as opposed to borrowed.
Guest article from Alyssa O.
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