Review: Better than a Killer, by Black Market Radio

After an entire summer of listening to Audioslave, Rage Against the Machine, and Soundgarden over and over, I felt ready to move on to some newer music. Having been in the mood for heavier music for the past few months, I wanted to continue on that line and find something grungy in the Soundgarden or Nirvana style, with lots of screaming, loud guitars and messy riffs.

Black Market Radio is a Seattle based group that attempts to deliver these goods. The group's frontman is Peter Cornell, who happens to be the brother of - you guessed it - Chris Cornell, of Soundgarden and Audioslave fame. Keith Mannino (bass, backing vocals and the occasional guitar) and Johnny D (drums) round out the trio.

Better than a Killer is the group's most recent album and features a decent dose of 90s style grunge for those who are nostalgic or for those who didn't listen to this stuff during middle and high school and only got into it less than a year ago (the latter is me). The title track is pretty good, but the middle of the album is where the meat is. "Link," "Big Stones," "Fight of Your Life" and "Suicide Parlour" are quite good, with introspective and oft depressing vocals combined with some heavy sounds. The rest of the 12-track album is passable. You can listen to some BMR here (definitely have a look and let me know what you think).

The main strength of the album is Peter Cornell. I guess great voices run in that family. Many other reviews note the strong resemblance in the brothers' voices. When Peter goes off in "Link":

So I raise my glass to the fallen angels...
I tip my hat to the fallen angels...

you feel like you're listening to Chris from his Badmotorfinger days.

But I think Peter has distinct and memorable moments that are very much unique to him and him alone. He cultivates his own style and works wonders across a wide variety of songs. For example, I could never imagine Chris belting out "Ghost" the way Peter does.

I'm not sure what the future will look like for Black Market Radio. I haven't seen too many reviews for this album (which released early-mid August) and the buzz hasn't picked up (yet). I definitely hope that this changes and that Peter Cornell gets noticed more than he has and ascends above the label "Chris' Brother."

In an interview early last year, Cornell claimed, "It's like [BMR is] involved in a renaissance of that [older, high quality] sound...It needs a resurgence. There's a lot of fans online that have felt neglected over the last three or four years." The band's motto then was "together we will save rock 'n roll."

Have they succeeded in that quest? I definitely think BMR's sound is, for the most part, a welcome distraction from the tired out stuff that bands like Linkin' Park put out. However, there are times when the band descends into the worn world of new school rock. Perhaps it can't be helped (unless you are the White Stripes).

I rate the album at 6.75/10.