Kris Barras Band – Monsters We Made

Review by – Jon Deaux
7/10
Grief and a right hook have more in common than you’d think!

Kris Barras used to be paid to knock his head against the faces of strangers inside an MMA cage. Now he gets paid to write choruses about being his own worst enemy – same career, different dental plan, fewer black eyes. He switched from punches to power chords sometime around 2015, and Monsters We Made, his sixth studio album and eleven tracks of hard rock stadium anthems, marks that transition in its final form. This is a man who’s decided that if he’s going to hurt people, he’ll do it with a chorus that’ll haunt your thoughts for a week – just like tinnitus.

Sadly, Kris’s mother passed away just before the recordings started. And this album is where he poured his grief into the music, rather than drowning in it, and Monsters We Made is a brutally appropriate title for the album – less a hard rock album, more a caption to a family picture nobody will want to explain at Christmas time. Most people would deal with such a year through a bottle of drink. Kris constructed a stadium rock cathedral instead. And you can’t get a DUI on guitar solos.

The title track starts off with the sound of UFC announcer introducing the match with a Marshall stack attached – huge riffs, big chorus capable of surviving a nuclear war, cockroaches and Nickelback reunion tour. Built to fill spaces as large as an aircraft hangar. The ambition is almost corporate – big singalongs, huge solos – but they live up to their promises.

The ballads provide air space to breathe on the record. ‘Otherside’ provides string orchestra and a tender moment, trying to run away from the dark version of himself – or the rather accurate description of looking at one’s bank statement. ‘Unspoken’ accomplishes the same thing through the story of broken minds and clear voices, and those two songs prove that KBB didn’t abandon the blues-rock DNA they were born from in favor of chasing Shinedown and Black Stone Cherry down the arena circuit. Bar band sincerity fighting against stadium bombast and winning the fight – unlike most bands who try the walk and turn out into Kerrang! cautionary tale.

‘Riot of One’ kills subtlety and doesn’t provide even a funeral service – trigger finger opening line, lion-feeding imagery, a chorus designed to be screamed back by thousands of people who had one too many drinks before the show. And considering the man’s boxing background, it sounds less like writing a song and more like a warning label. ‘Fake’ and ‘Rewind’ explore the same toxic destruction – betrayal and gaslighting – through the same hammer-it-to-the-bones choruses that will make ten thousand people scream back them without paying attention to the verses. And that’s how arena rock works. Subtlety never sells in such places.

‘Levitate’ provides the final act on raising yourself above all that – not letting himself be knocked down by whatever has been narrating the second half of the record. Eleven songs pushing the same agenda – guilt, grief, self-sabotage, expensive and slow climbing out of the whole mess. Dense, earnest, never boring and entirely predictable as a hard rock album from a former boxer mourning his mother would be.

It won’t change anything in the genre or convert anybody, but Monsters We Made does the job with some craft and heart.

Tracklist
01 Monsters We Made
02 Beautiful Lie
03 Riot of One
04 Unspoken
05 All Falls Down
06 Alive
07 Otherside
08 Fake
09 Rewind
10 End of Me
11 Levitate

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