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The Burden Brothers is made up of some strong musicians from the grunge scene with the core being Todd Lewis formerly of the Toadies and the former drummer for Izzy Stradlin of Guns 'n' Roses-- Taz Bently. Reviewing the talents: The core is amazing. Taz Bently absolutely pounds on a drum. Normally on a CD you can't tell how hard somebody hits on a drum head, but with Bently you can. Its pretty rad. Todd Lewis still has one of the coolest voices ever. When he wails, he rocks; it's something that nobody else can be duplicated. However, Lewis is an incredible vocalist when he just sings too, and he doesn't do that enough. Which brings us to this album.... "Mercy" is an ok set of songs. The intro track "It's Time" sucks. It does nothing to put you in a mood for the rest of the album and accomplishes nothing but annoying the listener for two minutes. The second and third songs on the album aren't much better either. "Mercy" doesn't get into the full swing of things until track 4 and then it's just good, not great. It hangs out at the good level pretty consistently until "I am a Cancer" and "Daughter of Science" stink it up on tracks 9 and 10, and "Oh, Cecilia" contributes to the 5 song list of bad tracks. Something pretty incredible happens on track 12 and 13 though. On "In My Sky" and "On Our Own" Todd Lewis sings (mostly just sings) and the band does a great job supporting him, making these two tracks the best on the album These two tracks still sound like the Toadies (because of Lewis), but more amazingly one things of comparisons to Dexter Freebish. If you get a chance to check out "In My Sky" and "On Our Own", do so. Both songs are oddly stimulating. "Mercy" can benefit from better songs. The band itself is amazing, these are talented musicians that can play pretty much anything they want to, but a good portion of the songs on this disc aren't good. If the list of bad tracks on this disc were cut down from 5 to 2, this would be a great album. They really could have just cut out two of the songs and still had a 13 song disc. Cut out the intro, and cut out "Shine" and you have a better group to work with. This isn't a band you have to check out, but they're worth a listen.