DIRT – Welcome To The Pressure Cooker

Rap Metal, Metal Core, Nu-Metal or whatever other name this type of music is labelled, there is never going to be any middle ground where someone is going to say “Yeah, it’s okay.” Metal fans are always going to complain about Rap singing in a Metal song and Rap fans will say the Metal guitars are spoiling a good Rap tune.

For all you Metal fans out there, Welcome to the Pressure Cooker has some pretty awesome rough, chugging and sludgy guitar riffs skilfully played by Jim Bryant. Bass player Justin Pocock keeps the songs rumbling along and there is some fanciful drumming from Mark Patrick keeping the beat. Take away the Rapping, the samples, programming, turntable wiggling, and other various MIDI insertions, and you have a down and dirty, kinda Grungy Rock album.

Take a listen to “Get Mine” and “What U Said” to get your head nodding. You even have a Rock Ballad to mellow out to in the haunting, acoustically melodic “Yesterday.” Dave “DBC” Burzanko has a very strong voice with a wide vocal range, backed and harmonized by Jim Bryant and Justin Pockock, and is well suited for singing Rock and Metal.

Welcome to the Pressure Cooker has more to offer Rap, Nu-Metal and Hip-Hop fans. DBC’s raping ability is as good as anything Limp Bizkit’s Fred Durst, Linkin Park’s Mike Shinoda, or even Eminem pumps out. His turntable wiggling, programming, samples and other MIDI electronica flow with, and are part of, each song, rather than just put in for the sake of having them in there somewhere to make it sound Hip-Hop. The tracks “Killing Me,” “Gimmie,” “Root of All Evil,” and “Bossman,” being the better tracks typifying this style of music. “Killing Me” also features Cali Hawk adding her vocal uniqueness to the mix.

Welcome to the Pressure Cooker belongs to that controversial hybrid fusion of Rap, Metal, Rock, and Hip-Hop, you can’t call it Nu-Metal as Nu-Metal is dead, many out there have read the obituary, and this style of music appeals to quite a narrow band of fans. Whatever label you want to give this type of music, Dirt play it very well. If you are a fan of this musical hybrid, then Dirt have created an album that will spend a long time on your playlist. However, Metal and Rap aficionados will shun it as the offspring from a marriage of musical genres that should under no circumstances have ever met, never mind made it to the altar.