Recent Reviews

April 2024

March 2024

February 2024

January 2024

[ More Music Reviews ]


Carmine and Vinny Appice: Drum Wars Live
Carmine and Vinny Appice - Drum Wars Live CD Album Review

Carmine & Vinny Appice: Drum Wars Live

Melodic Hard Rock/Metal
3.0/5.0

Website Facebook
Deadline Music (Cleopatra Records)
Words: Craig Hartranft
Added: 29.12.2014

Neither Carmine or Vinny Appice need little introduction. If you're a drummer or simply love drums in the hard rock or heavy metal context you know these brothers, their talent, and depth of their experience. Their Drum Wars project is both the adventure of brotherly love and competition, but also two musicians sharing their talent through drum clinics.

Carmine and Vinny Appice Drum Wars Live Photo

Carmine and Vinny Appice

Essentially, Drum Wars Live is the clinic taking the show to the road. The focus of the presentation is obviously the Appice drum skills, with solos for each brother but also the title track collaborative competition. If you want to get down on your drumming chops, the siblings definitely put on a 'clinic' for you. Listen and learn.

But, alternatively, you might not want to listen when the Appice brothers (with band) direct their formidable skills to cover some major heavy metal tunes. And the boys have quite the catalog to cull from. Mostly, they do stuff from Dio, Black Sabbath, and Ozzy with one Rod Stewart song thrown in. They totally butcher Do You Think I'm Sexy. But that could be said for most every cover here. Yeah, you get the essential gist of the song, whether melody or lyrical twist, for example. Basically, they simply don't sound good. Most of this is due to the simple fact the original songs are defined by the vocalist. Unless you got some comparable vocalist, the classics like Crazy Train and Stand Up and Shout are basically going to suck in an amateur's hands. I'm thinking the Appice bros should have put a larger crowbar to their wallets and gotten a better vocalist than the relatively unknown journeyman Jim Crean. He's dubious at best, not up to the task at worst. Ultimately, I listened to it once. I gave it to a drummer friend and he didn't have much to say about it upon its return to my hands. I'm thinking he wasn't impressed and, I guess, neither was I.

Carmine and Vinny Appice Drum Wars


CraigHartranft.net - New fiction, crime fiction by Craig Hartranft

Note: All Amazon advertising in this review first benefits the artist, then Craig Hartranft also receives a residual. Click, and thanks for your support.

In Short

Essentially, Drum Wars Live is the clinic taking the show to the road. The focus of the presentation is obviously upon the Appice drum skills, with solos for each brother and also the title track collaborative competition, with dubious covers to muck up the works.

Find A Review

Alphabetical Index

a b c d e f g h i j
k l m n o p q r s t
u v w x y z #
New & Notable
Read the Cruzh: The Jungle Revolution Album Review

Three years have passed since Sweden's Cruzh dropped their second long-player, Tropical Thunder, also introducing their new singer, Alex Waghorn. Now the band returns with The Jungle Revolution ... [ Read More ]