### Sinner: Danger zone

#### 09/02/11 || Habakuk

When I say “eighties heavy metal”, everybody knows what bands to think about, right? – Priest, Maiden, Accept, whatever. Given how archetypical that sound is, isn’t it a bit strange that those are pretty much the only bands that come to mind? I mean, there has to be a lot of stuff like it, not just the big names who constituted the genre singlehandedly – in that case we’d have called it priest metal in the first place. So…?

Enter Sinner.

In a stroke of genius they named their 1984 album after a proverbial 80s song before that one was even composed, had somebody draw the compulsory car & girl cover (badly) and set out to play formulaic heavy metal. Good for them that the formula used was and is fucken awesome:

The drums basically go bass-bass-snare all the way through a song with a massive disco sound, the guitars courtesy of (use bold, manly voice) “SG Stoner” and (use female voice) “Mick Shirley” – note that this is a German band – basically play variations of the intro riff to Accept’s “Flash rockin’ man” for each song and perform some decent solos. Last but not least Mr. Mathias Lasch aka “Mat Sinner” plays bass and makes sure to avoid falsetto and Udo Dirkschneider squealing, but raspily shouts his way through the tunes with lyrics about the sweet sweet ladies, dodgy stuff that makes him sound like he’s a fan of sexual predators (”he was in need of a woman he had nothing to lose, so he started looking around/ he was readyyyyy, out on the hunt/ he’s a rattle snake and nothing more/ he’s a rattlesnake looking for loohoove!“) and various other things from the danger zone. GO!

The result is exactly as great as that sounds. There are no ballads and almost no synthies, just one stomping, balls-out song in different versions, sometimes faster, sometimes slower. If you, too, want to be harder than diamonds, having this disc on repeat in your car stereo is as important as wearing heavily reflecting aviator glasses and chewing on toothpicks 24/7.

- Information
- Released: 1984
- Label: Noise records
- Website: www.matsinner.de
- Band
- Mat Sinner: vocals, bass
- SG Stoner: guitars
- Mick Shirley (Michael Scheuerle): guitars
- Ralf Schulz: drums

- Tracklist
- 01. Danger zone
- 02. No place in heaven
- 03. Scene of a crime
- 04. Lupo Manaro
- 05. Fast, hard & loud
- 06. The shiver
- 07. Razor blade
- 08. Shadow in the night
- 09. Wild winds
- 10. Rattlesnake