What made Evel Knievel so rad is not only that he could jump high and far, but lacked no shortage of class. He took a beatings with a smile; an indestructible, stylish, and fearless motherfucker. Without a doubt, The Distillers' first, self-titled foray into the world of music, they jumped over trash heap lyrics and broken windshield clichés littering the punk landscape and landed with authority. Greatness and expansion are rarely based on repetition. Not content to land the same trick over and over again, what The Distillers set off to clear on their second full-length, Sing Sing Death House, has been set on fire. The musical distance has been increased. Steering the ship with gritty, slur-phrased screams from the gutter and searing guitar is twenty-two-year-old Australian, Brody. Bolt that on to the fact you can almost see the lipstick smeared outside the lines from Rose's sneering, lurching rhythm guitar and you've got a recognizable force. Andy, who's pulling double duty skin-destroying drum missions in both The Distillers and The Nerve Agents (no, not the lethal organo-phosphorus compounds, the hardcore band on Hellcat) adds to the arsenal. Just as Brody found Rose immediately prior to recording the first record, the band found Ryan working at a record store a month before Sing Sing Death House. Unlike the Berlin Wall, Ryan's bass doesnt crumble, doesn't divide the songs, and just as there's love at first sight, the band opened up and immediately fell in step with the recording process

With Brett Gurewitz (Bad Religion, owner of Epitaph Records) at the mixing helm, produced by The Distillers and Donnell Cameron (NOFX, Pennywise, 7 Seconds) and recorded at Westbeach, you know the record sounds like a missle's going off from your stereo to directly between your eyes.