Cinder
Review by Dan Grote

Cinder - Break Your Silence
Label: Geffen
Rating:
Release Date: Feb 4, 2003

A (fictional) scene from the studio during the recording of Cinder's major label debut, Break Your Silence, produced by Stone Temple Pilots frontman Scott Weiland:

Scott: Hey guys, this album is really coming together, but you know what would be really cool? If you made your album sound like a mediocre version of Core.

End Scene

And so it is that Scott Weiland, who, when left to his own devices and a huge bag of heroin, unleashed one of the oddest, un-rock and roll albums of 1998, has now sicked Cinder upon the world. The band's first LP reads like the Purple follow-up many early STP fans had been clamoring for, with its �90s throwback sound.

"Soul Creation," the album's first song, plays like an invitation to travel back in time ten years or so, when their producer's band was first accused of sounding derivative (in the words of David Spade: "I liked this band the first time I heard them� when they were called Pearl Jam"). The grunge nostalgia wave hits full force on "Crutch" which dares to mix Korn's guitar stutter and guttural growling with Layne Staley's whining drawl.
Weiland himself does guest vocal duties on "Lush," which certainly doesn't help the band's plea for respect, if they do in fact want respect.

Cinder try though, and they try the hardest not on the grunge retreads, but on the ballads, namely "She Said," about a woman whose love for her boyfriend has died, and "Daddy," which is of course about abandonment (what band doesn't have abandonment issues these days?).

The biggest affront to decency on this album, however, may be "Consuela," which is the lamest ode-to-a-girl song since the last ode-to-a-girl song (which was probably "Adrienne" by the Calling), a once proud genre that gave us Buddy Holly's "Peggy Sue" but was destroyed some time in the mid-eighties by Steve Perry's "Oh Sherry."

VERDICT: Break Your Silence is as plain as the CD case the promo was delivered to me in. While its fourth-hand grunge is still better than much of the watered-down middle-of-the-road that's taken over VH-1, there's nothing better than the real thing. If anything, the album teaches a very important lesson: just because you idolize a rock singer, that doesn't mean he'll be a good producer.

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