Parabellum's Stainless debut was nearly ten years in the making and its 12 songs prove it by tipping the scales at almost-70-minutes of running time. Unfortunately, it's debatable whether such generous girth actually helps the album's cause, since the group's relatively competent, never brilliant, and the songs simply lack the "can't-get-enough" quality to back this up. Instead, they seriously test the attention span with well-intentioned but often ploddingly dull slabs of American doom ("Skull and Bones," "The Wound That Never Heals," etc.), and mostly derivative exercises in Southern sludge ("All Against All," "Sheep So Blind," etc.), all of which owe far too much to the specters of Saint Vitus and Crowbar, and even more to the Phil Anselmo school of baritone singing over cleaner passages. Rare are the true flashes of inspiration -- displayed here by the memorable, insistent riff of "Voyage Through the Unknown," the effectively ominous minor-key melodies of "Murder, Lust, Suicide," and the evocatively stated lyrics about heroin addiction on "Locust Dreams in Potters Field"; frequent and excessively lengthy recycling of indistinctive riffs, and the sonic quirks reminiscent of similarly ill-fated southern sludgers like the short-lived Floodgate. At the end of the day (delivered by the surprisingly thrash-paced crescendo in the oddball "Pacifier"), mediocre seems too harsh a word to sum up Parabellum's obvious hard work; but when faced with such remarkable longevity in the shadows of so many far more successful peers, one must inevitably conclude that the shoe regretfully fits on Stainless' modest achievements. ~ Eduardo Rivadavia, All Music Guide
