SKANSIS – Take Your Chances

The Heavy Rock band Skansis comes from Switzerland and has been around for seven years. After releasing two demos earlier, they have now released their debut album, Take Your Chances, on Escape Music. This is a great debut record and the first impression after listening to it is: GREAT VOCALS! Reto Reist could remind you of a lighter version of the legendary W.A.S.P. vocalist Blackie Lawless.

The opening song “Is That Enough” pounds out the energy from a hungry band. Not very original with this song, but wow; it’s definitely one hell of an opening track! The band ignites the dynamite and makes the song explode from the very beginning. You can just imagine how this one will sound on stage in front of a thousand strong! Just priceless! Reto Reist really impresses with his talented voice. The terrific vocals should be reason enough to buy this album, but of course, when you have other excellent reasons in almost every song, there’s no way back.

The band takes the intensity further into another awesome song: “Will You Be There.” It starts out so beautiful and then the band tosses the heavy chorus in your face. It’s such a joy listening to! Midway in the song there’s a great guitar solo upon a really nice keyboard melody, which sounds very atmospheric. The constant guitar wall is turned down for a second and an awesome twin-guitar solo comes in … a short, but highly inspiring solo.

And finally, on the following track “All I Care,” the guitarist lets the wish of varied riffing come true, just before their constant “one chord-at-the-time-pounding” gets irritating. This is also a very energetic and catchy song. It’s a shame that no guitar solo appears.

Not to forget the other tunes on this album, like the very riff-based “Dangermind,” or the title track, which is another heavy, riff-dominated song. A massive rhythm section makes for a great foundation, which is characterized by the great pounding of the drums and the constant one note hitting of the bass guitar.

“Lay Your Hands On Me” opens up with an irritating riff, or in other words, a horrible, Bluesy, acoustic guitar melody. It’s Reist’s voice that saves the song from a total collapse. The song proceeds into a heavier part, but this Blues thing seems to come back all the way through the song, which destroys the track badly! It’s just irritating, and it sure isn’t a worthy closer to this record!

Take Your Chances has its share of greatness, but there sure are some weak spots on it as well. The music is good, but not outstanding, and there are some tunes that are not given a chance at all, like the nowhere-going ballade “Justice.” Much of the album character manages to stay on a 7/10 pace because of the extraordinary voice of Reto Reist, and he literally saves the album.