Album Review: Losing All
By Day Of Fire

By Paul Anthony | February 13th, 2010

Razor And Tie

{January 26, 2010}

If it seems like Day of Fire sounds like a rock band that just stepped out of the late 1990s, well, there’s a good reason.

Lead singer Josh Brown was fronting Full Devil Jacket, an up-and-coming hard rock band that had scored a prime opening slot on Creed’s national tour with Collective Soul. A heroin dose that nearly killed him changed all that. Rehab and a conversion to Christianity took him away from the music industry until he formed Day of Fire in 2004.

In many ways, the band’s third album, “Losing All,” recalls many of the good things about the hard rock bands of the late 1990s and early 2000s - the bluesy, grungy sounds of Creed, Monster Magnet, Days of the New and their predecessors like Stone Temple Pilots, Soundgarden and Alice in Chains.

But in others, the album recalls why many of those turn-of-the-century bands vanished after just two or three albums.

“Losing All” gets off to a nice start with “Light ‘Em Up,” which features a toe-tapping groove and voal stylings reminiscent of the Doors. Like many of the album’s best songs, it’s catchy, it will play very well live, and it’s a pleasure when it shows up in the iPod mix.

But the second song, “Hello Heartache,” is a complete change of style. It’s less blues and more grunge. Less toe tapping and more finger tapping - as in, when do we get to the next track? It’s too slow to rock and too rocky for a ballad. And there are too many songs like it for “Losing All” to live up to its potential. These songs not only gunk up the album, they fade into the background. In a world of Facebook, Twitter, Call of Duty, YouTube, you name it, a rock band needs tracks that make the listener sit up and listen, but this and several others seem designed for fading into the background.

This makes “Losing All” a bit frustrating. For every “When I See You” and “Lately,” which mix together the best elements of the grunge, blues and post-metal genres, there’s an “Airplane” or a “Landslide,” which break up the flow of the album and do nothing for the listener.

By the end of the album, there is very little to distinguish the songs from each other. Rockers and mid-tempo pieces alike seem to blend together. This is arguably the No. 1 pitfall that Christian rock bands struggle to avoid: Finding a formula that works for one or two songs and filling an album with it until the album is drudgery to work through.

“Losing All” redeems itself with the final track, a terrific acoustic blues song called “The Dark Hills.” The style perfectly complements the blues-infused hard rock of the album’s early tracks.

There are enough good songs on “Losing All” - four of the toe-tappers, the blues ballad and “Never Goodbye,” anot