Music reviews. CD reviews. Critically hip!

I was in New Jersey a couple of months ago and there seems to be a renewed energy in the air. There are a lot of energetic bands, there are a couple of radio stations that kick righteous ass, and a found a couple of indy CD stores (one in downtown Red Bank) that are worth driving a couple of hours for. Maybe Jersey has always been like that, and the energy never went away. Maybe the rest of the country left and NJ just kept on truckin', waiting for hard rock to become fashionable again. Whatever. It's there. And it sounds great.

Otto's Daughter, through their self-produced and released sophomore disc, RENEW, exemplifies what appears to be a trend in metal/hard rock bands these days, with female lead singers taking over. They call their music "industrial popcore," an interesting, and, on tracks like "Stuck" and "Devil's Paradise," appropriate. I had some momentary hesitation at the beginning of RENEW, where lead vocalist Jacqueline van Bierk seems to be doing her best Linda Blair imitation by way of Ozzy, but she quickly forsakes this. And a good thing, too. While there occasionally is a manifestation of the ladies growling like a bad Sepultura imitation, van Bierk for the most part takes her inspiration from Joan Jett, Chrissie Hynde or Siouxie as opposed to whatsername from the Plasmatics. She has a great voice, and if it's occasionally (rarely) thin in spots, the material she's singing over is considerate enough that she can get away with it.

A lot of hard rock CDs lose me by the third cut or so simply because it all begins to sound alike. Otto's Daughter doesn't have this problem. There are a lot of changeups here, and the band has a good sense of dynamics that compensate for a relative lack of hooks. The influence of Sabbath and Osbourne are immediately apparent to this old man on tunes like "Better," but to perfectly honest (and this will sound like blasphemy to some) they avoid Sabbath's excesses. Similarly, the shadow of Trent Reznor hovers over the entire project, but again, Otto's Daughter draws back from the precipice which Reznor all too often jumps over, to his detriment.

RENEW, overall, treads a thin line, neatly splitting the difference between accessibility and deliberate obscurity. Your parents will hate this CD, and scream at you to turn it down, but at least they won;t worry about you murdering them in their sleep after listening to it.