STRYPER

Cleaning up the office at the end of the year, making room for the onslaught of 2006 releases, this one popped up and seemed like an irresistible piñata for critical derision. STRYPER, those God-rockin' bumblebees with the lame ballads and hair from here to the Pearly Gates? Well, pass me some of that yellow-and-black striped crow, because "Reborn" is about a million times better than it has any right to be.

I can't claim to be any kind of expert on the band's back catalog — I guffawed at their videos, smirked at their singles, and when they got secular on 1990's "Against the Law", I joined the rest of the world in ignoring them as their career went into the toilet. And hey, if you choose to dismiss this review and continue to think of STRYPER as a total joke, I'm not gonna stop you — these guys lived by the spandex, and if they die by it, that's just karma coming back to bite them in the back pew.

But the band has had a cult following (can I call it that?) since their demise, one that was anxiously awaiting new music from the foursome. After a reunion tour and a new bassist, the band obliged, adding a dash of modern heaviness to their melodic metal attack. Singer Michael Sweet seems to have matured a bit as a singer since those days, turning down the girlier aspects of his voice, and the songs pack a surprising, riff-heavy punch without selling out the melodies. Check out "When Did I See You Cry", which boasts harmonies and crunchy guitars with an urgent, driving rhythm that, under any other name, might actually make it on rock radio in 2006.

It's really hard to get over how modern this sounds, and I mean that in a good way. The open chords and the vocal hooks wouldn't sound out of place coming from an emo band, and there's nothing retro or “eighties" about much of this (check out the walloping cover of oldie "In God We Trust"!). If I may risk incurring even more laughs from the peanut gallery, it's like when WARRANT got serious (and dropped) and quit being pansies, around '95 or so, and turned in the supremely underrated "Ultraphobic" album. The path of least resistance woulda been to churn out a few creaky power ballads, pile on the VH1 Classic schlock, and cash in – but these songs sound like the band mean it, and are doing what comes naturally to them, commercial sales be damned — er, darned.

Okay, so it's not a LAMB OF GOD record — "Passion" sounds like the guy from STYX singing prom-rock, and once in a while the band confuses "modern" with “dated mid-1990s grunge" ("Live Again") or "anemic radio crap" ("Rain"). But the fact that I'm even sitting here defending, and enjoying, a STRYPER record is blowing my mind. There it is, though — this is a surprising album from a band that has no business not sucking.

Despite the impressive showing of a handful of bands (ATOMIC OPERA, BELIEVER, EXTOL and TOURNIQUET immediately come to mind),there's still a largely-justified impression of Christian rock and metal as being a weak-tea imitation of the real thing, somehow losing what makes the music special in its insistence on message first. But "Reborn" is just a good hard rock album, regardless of what side of the churchyard fence you're on. These songs have massive hooks, Sweet can sing his ass off, and even though the band is adamant in their beliefs, there are very few moments when a heathen listener feels "preached at."

A good review of a STRYPER album wasn't exactly how I was planning to start off a new year, but there you go. I'm gonna go to bed now before anything weirder happens.