Cost: Around $2
"Love's Not Enuff?" "Someone Like U?" "Love Warrior?" "Which Side R/U On?" It's hard to be optimistic when 3 songs sound like Prince song titles and the only grammatically correct one has "love" in it. Yet, the disc itself has a "100% American Metal" disclaimer...
I can't recall for sure if I'd heard of the band before, but I had a vague notion of reading about them in some article or forum post about '80s metal bands with black members. For some reason Sound Barrier came to mind when I saw this disc, and sure enough, frontman Willie Basse did do a project with one of the Sound Barrier guys, so I'm thinking I did read about them somewhere before. Black Sheep previously released an '85 LP with a young and uncredited Paul Gilbert playing guitar on some of the tracks.
Half of the mini-CD songs dabble in more commercial, rock-based stuff--not all that interesting for me--but the others pleasantly surprised me and delivered real heavy metal. The two best tracks are re-recordings of tunes originally on that '85 album. "Love's Not Enuff" and "Love Warrior" musically remind me of uptempo stuff from Dio/Martin era Sabbath. I read a YouTube comment on one of the '85 songs mentioning that there was a Paul Stanley vibe to the vocals, which I can very much hear.
As for the two other tracks, the slower "Someone Like U" kills the energy of the opener and shows a more standard rock influence. "Which Side Are R/U On," while heavy, is also unfortunately overly groovy and modern. Still, the two good tracks make this far better than I was expecting.
I should add as a personal point of interest that while researching the band for this post, I noticed Willie Basse played bass on the Ozz No Prisoners album (which often makes those internet "worst/silliest rock album cover" lists largely due to the rather, uh, flamboyant pose of the singer).
