Album Review: Hellyeah - Band Of Brothers

Throw your cowboy hats in the air, slap your knees and exclaim 'yeehaw', because redneck metal supergroup Hellyeah are back with album number three. With southern pride worn on their sleeves, and liquor on their breath, the five-piece have released their most competent slab of belligerent, burly, post-Pantera groove metal yet.

The formula the band have employed on Band Of Brothers is simple; if the selling point of your band is that it contains members of Pantera, Mudvayne, Nothingface and Damageplan, then your music should sound like an amalgamation of Pantera, Mudvayne, Nothingface and Damageplan. There are haunting similarities between Band Of Brothers and the members of Hellyeah's individual works; Vinnie Paul's drum tone is exactly the same as it was on the quartet of seminal Pantera releases, Chad Gray is abusing his throat and ripping out the same wrenching screams from Mudvayne's The End Of All Things To Come while the chugging tough-guy riffs could have just as easily fit in any of the members' previous bands.

Working within the confines of what they spent the bulk of their individual careers doing, Band Of Brothers is a very self-assured record. Where 2009's Stampede and the band's 2007 self-titled debut had the band fumbling around styles like outlaw country and southern rock, Brothers has Hellyeah blasting listeners with the bravado and swagger of a band who knows what they're best at, so much so that during album closer What It Takes To Be Me Chad Gray screams “Cause I'm the shit anyway!”. Arrogance of such an assertion aside, Band Of Brothers sounds like Hellyeah finally making good on their promise as a supergroup.