CD review: We Are Not Alone - Breaking Benjamin

Grunge-influenced metallers Breaking Benjamin had just a few months to put together their second album. Luckily, Billy Corgan stepped in to help out, writes Nathan Palmer.

When vocalist/guitarist Ben Burnley was at high school in Pennsylvania, he listened to The Smashing Pumpkins' Siamese Dream obsessively.

So it must have felt like a dream come true when Hollywood Records asked Burnley to co-write songs with his boyhood idol Billy Corgan, to help ease the writer's block.

They wrote three songs together which, not coincidentally, are also the cream of We Are Not Alone.

Corgan contributed guitar to, and co-wrote, the mellow, breezy stand-out Forget It, a track which wouldn't sound of place a Coldplay album.

However, most of the album is made of harder stuff with guitarist Aaron Fink playing some sizzling Rage Against the Machine/Tool style riffs, especially on the opener, So Cold.

Likewise, Believe opens with a great wah-wah-drenched intro which dissolves into a pounding, choppy sea of molten metal.

The following track, album closer Rain, is a soft, dreamy acoustic ballad, co-written with Corgan. It couldn't be more different to Believe.

Such contrasts show that Breaking Benjamin are far from one dimensional and deserve to dent the charts with their mainstream take on grunge-metal.

We Are Not Alone is out now through Hollywood Records/FMR. You can order it online at Amazon.com for $10.99.