Apocalypse Later Music Reviews: speed metal

Showing posts with label speed metal. Show all posts

Friday, 22 March 2024

Midnight - Hellish Expectations (2024)

Country: USA
Style: Black/Speed Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 8 Mar 2024
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | Metal Archives

I'm not sure we can truly say that Midnight formed in 2003, given that it's a one man solo project put into motion back when Athenar was merely Jamie Walters, the bassist and vocalist in an Ohio based heavy metal band called Boulder. I guess it's when he came up with the name and recorded an initial demo. A couple of decades on, Boulder are long gone but Midnight are well established, this being his sixth studio album. In fact, he's ramping up output, Rebirth by Blasphemy, Let There Be Witchery and this arriving only two years after each other.

It's a real step up on its predecessor, which was decent but slower and more sedate than a typical Midnight live performance, where they blitz through song after song at so frantic pace that each could be a bullet and they have to empty the bandolier before closing time. This really doesn't do anything that's new to anyone who's heard Midnight before, but it feels far more representative of their stage show and that's a good thing. They blister on stage and it's felt awkward to me that they don't blister on album. Well, they do here.

Sure, Escape Total Hell kicks off the album with what could have been an S.O.D. mosh part, but it's ready to speed up quickly and it doesn't even think about slowing down again, except as one tease midway before launching right back into full gear again. The previous album feels like it was stuck in third gear compared to this, which is pedal to the metal all the way. This is a quintessential song for Midnight too, hearkening right back to the early days of extreme metal. There's Bathory here and Venom and even someone like Bulldozer. The riffs are simple but they're relentless.

The most unusual aspect to Expect Total Hell is that it lasts almost three and a half minutes, which makes it almost an epic for Midnight. There are ten tracks on offer here but this is the only one to reach three minutes. The entire album has stripped off, washed up and gone to bed in not far over twenty-five minutes. When an album is over three minutes shorter than Reign in Blood, even with the same number of tracks, then you know it's inherently stripped down to its vicious essence.

All ten of these tracks get down to business immediately and don't waste time wrapping up when they're done, even something like Slave of the Blade, which is a tad slower than the tracks before it, playing out with even more of a Tank vibe to the guitarwork than others, both the riffs and the solos, and an Exciter transition into the chorus. As you might imagine from the names I've thrown out there as comparisons, everything's old school here. In many ways, Midnight's sound is close to everything I loved about heavy metal in the mid eighties. There's NWOBHM riffing, the tempo of early speed metal and the edge of proto-extreme metal, all at the same time.

In many ways, Athenar has found the balance point between early Saxon and early Bathory, but I can't figure out which way that goes. Maybe it's both in turn. Dungeon Lust isn't light years away from Saxon covering Return of the Darkness and Evil, while Nuclear Savior has moments where it could be Bathory covering Motorcycle Man. There's Motörhead all over Expect Total Hell and in a whole bunch of the other songs too. There's Tank everywhere. Mercyless Slaughtor (sic) goes back to that S.O.D. moshing mindset. F.O.A.L. kicks off like Girlschool but is presumably another Venom homage, a nod to their F.O.A.D.

Of course, extreme metal has moved on a long way in the half a century since all those tracks saw original release, but you wouldn't be able to tell listening to Midnight. The most modern sounds to be found here are the black metal tinges to Athenar's Cronos-inspired vocals and the 21st century production values. Bathory never sounded this clear. He's still back in the early eighties and I have no complaints. I'm just fascinated in how he varies his influences depending on which instrument he's playing. When he's behind the kit, he's Philthy Animal Taylor. On bass, he's Cronos. When he's playing a guitar, he's Mick Tucker and Peter Brabbs of Tank.

And, at the end of the day, he's Athenar, because, as much as we can hear all those influences as if there were closed captions pointing them out to us, the result sounds like Midnight. While I only gave Let There Be Witchery a 6/10, because it sounded like a slower, watered down version of the Midnight I saw on stage, I'm happy to give this one an easy 7/10 because it has all the energy and pace of the Midnight I saw on stage. I'd go higher, because it's so much fun, but the constant lack of originality brings it back down again. So a safe 7/10 it is this time out for a more authentic take on Midnight.

Tuesday, 7 November 2023

Diabolic Night - Beneath the Crimson Prophecy (2023)

Country: Germany
Style: Black/Speed Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 20 Oct 2023
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | Metal Archives

Diabolic Night have been around for a decade now and they released their debut in 2019, but they are new to me. They're Germans, based in North Rhine-Westphalia, and they play a combination of black and speed metal. I'd lean towards the latter as the primary component, because they sound old school when they play up the speed, more like a proto-black metal band. They often sound like early Whiplash with a veneer of black metal laid carefully over the top. However, many songs also feature sections where they tone down the speed and these have a tendency to feel far more like atmospheric black metal. Check out the beginning to Pandemonium for a great example.

Unusually for black/speed metal bands, Diabolic Night write longer tracks, all eight on offer here passing four minutes with a pair of more epic tracks that respectively approach seven and exceed eight. That allows them to set the stage on a track like Pandemonium, before launching into high gear to blister at us. It also allows them to take their time during the midsection for instrumental breaks. It's this structure that sells them to me, because it combines the blitzkrieg of black/speed metal with a more substantial proggy NWOBHM edge that I highly appreciate.

Each highlight for me does all of those three things, Pandemonium perhaps being my favourite of these tracks, with Voyage to Fortune close behind and pretty much everything else not far behind that one. Starlit Skies adds a couple of minutes, which doesn't remotely make the song too long; it simply blisters for longer in its core section and boasts a longer atmospheric outro. However, that song is followed by Vicious Assault, which ditches those extra subtleties and immediately finds top gear, reminding again of early Whiplash but with a Kreator-style chorus. It's the shortest track on offer at 4:12 and that makes a lot of sense.

Interestingly, they're primarily a one man band, that one man being Kevin Heier, owner of Mortal Rite Records, who performs as Heavy Steeler. He sings lead and plays all the guitars and bass, with occasional addition of synths. The only other musician in play is Christhunter, who may or may not be an actual member of the band as against a session hire. The generally reliable Metal Archives lists him as session only, but he served this role on both albums. It's telling that his approach is an old school speed metal one, rarely dipping into the traditional blastbeats of black metal.

I would guess that Heavy Steeler thinks of himself as a guitarist rather than a vocalist, because he shines brightest in that role, never feeling like he's overstretching himself, even at his fastest, but I rather like his vocals. They're raspy and deep but they're also mostly intelligible, so they're closer to thrash vocals than anything from black metal. He never shifts into growls or shrieks, though he does throw in a few death grunts here and there, underlining that there's a Celtic Frost influence here, along with Whiplash and early Bathory.

They collectively place the sound in the mid eighties but the slower sections are a little earlier. In songs like Starlit Skies and Arktares Has Fallen, they often reminded me of Paul Di'Anno-era Iron Maiden, of songs like Remember Tomorrow. That all works for me, because these are some of my favourite eras in metal, after the classic and prog rock of the seventies had been infused by punk energy and then started on the roads to extreme metal. I wasn't immediately sold on it, because Revelation is a long intro and Tales of Past & Mystery is my least favourite track proper, but it grew on me with repeat listens and The Sacred Scriptures and then Pandemonium were able to bring me firmly on board.

I don't believe Heavy Steeler plays with anyone else, but his tastes here make me wonder what he puts out on Mortal Rite. The only release I've reviewed here at Apocalypse Later is Lynx's Watcher of Skies, which I enjoyed, but as a hard and heavy band, they're at the lighter end of Mortal Rite's spectrum, which primarily revolves around speed, thrash and black metal, with those elements in combination more often than not. I should check out more.

Wednesday, 26 July 2023

Raven - All Hell's Breaking Loose (2023)

When I reviewed Raven's fourteenth album, Metal City, in 2020, I suggested that they hadn't much changed from their early days in the eighties, the style still fast and raucous without any apparent care to update for the modern era. This fifteenth album follows suit but I do have something more substantial to say this time out because the songs are a lot better. In fact, I ended that review with the suggestion that, while I enjoyed it, "I'll surprise myself if I remember any of these songs when I wake up tomorrow morning." I was right, but some of these songs are already sticking in my brain.

Quality is really the only difference. The line-up is the same, John & Mark Gallagher still the focus, as they've been since founding the band back in 1974, with Mike Heller still behind the drumkit, as he's been since joining in 2019. The sound is the same, heavy metal rather than speed metal but in a fashion that reminds us that Raven were one of the latter genre's key influences. The songs are relatively straightforward, with simple but powerful riffs, almost out of control vocals and speedy but catchy results. The biggest difference from the early days is Heller's use of double bass pedals.

Last time out, I enjoyed the album on multiple listens, but could still only find one song to call out as a highlight, which was the one they kicked it off with. It wasn't that the songs were bad, simply that they weren't particularly good either. Here, they're much stronger, kicking off well again but keeping going this time. Medieval is another solid opener, but Surf the Tsunami is a better follow-up, my first highlight of the album. The drums are frenetic, as Heller is keen to keep them, but the riffs are excellent and the hooks are strong. Two songs in, it's already better than its predecessor.

And there are other highlights to come. All Hell's Breaking Loose is pure Raven, energetic British heavy metal from the opening roar. John Gallagher in particular has a blast on this one, speaking these parts, singing those and screaming the rest. The chorus, delivered in backing vocals, is very memorable too. Desperate Measures echoes much of what I just said, but with an even better riff that absolutely stuck in my brain—I found myself humming it while doing the dishes, which has to be about the least metal activity there is— and a little more of a single-minded approach. It just doesn't want to be quite as fancy, not that fancy is a particularly good word to use on a Raven LP.

Invasion is a grower for me, because it starts out slower and heavier but kicks into gear with style, barrelling along through its midsection. It becomes a blitzkrieg and the only track left that has to follow it is more than up to the task. It's Go for the Gold, which features another storming chorus, another couple of excellent wild guitar solos from Mark Gallagher and even more drum fills than ever from Heller, who's been steadily working through his repertoire throughout the album and I should add that he's not just a drummer, he's a drum teacher.

In fact, Heller is an absolute dynamo on this album, an excellent choice of new school drummer for Raven's old school style. It's like the Gallaghers are throwing everything they have at him but he's keeping up with it all and relishing the challenge. I won't say that he manages it effortlessly, as I'd say there are a couple of moments when it feels as if he's actually having to work hard, but I would absolutely say mostly effortlessly. When Raven started out, it felt like they were unprecedentedly fast, pushing the envelope. They haven't changed much at all but metal has moved on. They're not remotely the fastest band in the world any more and Heller can almost keep up in his sleep.

So that's five highlights on an album with ten songs, which is a pretty strong hit rate, especially in comparison to the one last time out. What's perhaps most important is that the lesser songs here are probably all better than the lesser nine on Metal City and that means that this is more than a little bit better, it's a lot better. It's an easy 7/10 but I'm wondering if I should nudge it up to an 8. I find myself in two minds there. The pro is the consistency, because it's strong throughout, nothing letting the side down. The con is the lack of originality, because absolutely nothing here is close to new. Ditch the double bass pedal and Raven could have played these songs live in 1982.

So I think a 7/10 it is but it's a high 7/10. If you're a Raven fan and you don't care about originality, which seems like a redundant pairing, add another point to my rating because you're going to be a lot happier with All Hell's Breaking Loose than Metal City. You're going to replay this one a lot.

Wednesday, 19 July 2023

Enforcer - Nostalgia (2023)

Enforcer are Swedish, where they're currentliy based in Stockholm. They've been around most of a couple of decades now, since 2004, but were originally a one man project built around the multi-instrumental talents of Olof Wikstrand, who's still their lead vocalist and one of two guitarists. He gradually gave up his instrumental reponsibilities until Enforcer became an actual band and there are now four members, with Garth Condit the new fish on bass, having joined last year. They seem to be typically regarded as heavy/speed metal, which appeals to me. There are far too few speed metal bands nowadays, in my opinion.

Well, half of their sound is definitely heavy/speed metal. Unshackle Me feels like quintessentially eighties heavy metal, so much so that a few lines could easily have been translated into jingles for the Friday Rock Show. Coming Alive is the same thing but faster, with the guitars outstripping the drums and the energy simply leaping out of the speakers. It's still heavy metal rather than speed metal per se, but it's a notably frenetic song, one that's so highly pitched that it almost feels like it was recorded slower but then sped up digitally. It has an energy right out of early Iron Maiden and Raven, maybe a little Tank too, especially in the riffing on songs like Kiss of Death.

I'd call this eighties British heavy metal mindset their default sound and that higher pitch is what shapes it the most. I mentioned Garth Condit on bass, but I had to fiddle with my graphic equaliser to see if I could actually hear him. I'm sure he's on the album, but the mix seems to be allergic to bass, so this ends up as a very clean sound, as if it's somehow afraid of getting dirty. Maybe it does make it feel more authentically eighties, because recording technology was very different then, but it seems weird in 2023. It makes Enforcer seem like the anti-Venom, a band who want some of their songs to be fast and heavy, but also germophobically clean, every note carefully wiped down before it makes it to our speakers.

There's another aspect to their sound that perhaps naturally emerges from this and that's a hair metal power ballad sound. Some songs go there more than others, but it's there to a degree on all but the fastest songs, like Coming Alive. Heartbeats is where it initially becomes obvious, starting out like a power ballad with what I took to be female vocals—they're not, they're Olf Wikstrand, as on every other song—and evolving into an arena rock song with a metallic edge. Nostalgia is a full on ballad, kicking off wistfully with almost Spanish guitar. I imagined waiters bringing roses to my table in their restaurant for that special moment, but having to turn around and vanish when she says no. It's always a power ballad, but halfway through it evoles into a power metal ballad.

Perhaps understandably, given its title, Keep the Flame Alive is the most obvious power ballad. It begins with pop hooks and oohs from Wikstrand and, after a side trip into eighties metal mode, it goes back to that again. It's a schizophrenic song that epitomises what Enforcer do on this album. Half the time, it and they are reminiscent of the endless stream of bands who grew in the shadow of Iron Maiden's success, bands like Elixir, merely with the bass turned down. The other half, they get poppy and Wikstrand sweetens up into a female sounding voice and they're like Vixen turning into the Bangles.

It's fair to say that I like both modes, whether this Swedish vocalist is singing in English, as on most of the album, or Spanish, as he does fluently on Metal Supremacia, but it's never not offputting. I find myself in the odd position of rather enjoying this band and their songs, but not this album. It's unfair to slate it based entirely on the production but I want to hear this with some dirt in the mix and some rawness to its energy. I can deal with Wikstrom's voice soaring like Klaus Meine's, even if the band could benefit from a backing vocalist in a lower register, but blistering songs like Coming Alive deserve to have some real crunch to them and that means turning up the bass seriously up.

I actually checked out versions of that song on YouTube that were recorded live and, even though YouTube is hardly a place to go for quality sound, every version has better sound than this one. It's a better song at Rockpalast and I'd actually suggest that it's a better song in the small club version where the cameraman is so close to the speaker stack that it seems like the main microphone isn't switched on and all we get is the lower end. This band seriously rocks. Let's actually hear that next time. This ought to be a 7/10 album, with energy going to 8/10 and originality dropping to 6/10. I'm dropping a point for the production though because I can't not.

Wednesday, 14 June 2023

Savage Grace - Sign of the Cross (2023)

Country: USA
Style: Heavy/Speed Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 5 May 2023
Sites: Bandcamp | Metal Archives | Official Website | Wikipedia

I remember Savage Grace peripherally from their heyday in the eighties. They formed in 1981 with the name of Marquis de Sade, perhaps appropriately given the cover art they would come up with over the years, but quickly renamed to Savage Grace, which is a quintessential heavy metal name. They put out two albums and an EP in only three years but then fell away, eventually ceasing to be in 1992, at the same time as so many other heavy metal bands in the face of grunge. Well, they're back, with guitarist and former lead vocalist Christian Logue hiring a variety of foreign musicians to give him one more shot.

That's probably an unfortunate turn of phrase, because his activities in between attempts to keep Savage Grace a viable entity, apparently include "practicing medicine without a license" under the name of Dr. Richard Santee. Quite why a fake doctor needs an arsenal of military-style weaponry is an open question, but hopefully this album means that he's back on the straight and narrow, with a go forward plan to dedicate himself to music. It also may explain why this Los Angeles band has a Puerto Rican singer and a Brazilian rhythm section nowadays.

If memory serves, they never sounded like a Los Angeles band, even when they were based there in the eighties before moving to New York. There is some of that glam rock sound here in Stealin' My Heart Away and especially in the closer, Helsinki Nights. The former reminded me of a band such as Tokyo Blade who played power/speed metal when I found them but shifted with the climate to find their way into other genres, including glam rock. The latter feels like a cover of a Mötley Crüe song performed faux live by Krokus, but it's actually an original. It's raucous rock 'n' roll and it's a heck of a lot of fun. I'd call it a highlight even if doesn't sound much like the primary approach here.

For a power/speed metal band, that primary approach is old school heavy metal with an occasional burst of speed. The most common influence seems to be Judas Priest, with three songs here taken right out of the Priest playbook. Automoton (sic) is the first, a little slower than the opener, but it builds its energy wonderfully and wraps up at speed. A few songs later, Slave of Desire returns to a Priest sound, lead vocalist Gabriel Colón doing a fantastic Rob Halford impression. A final take from the Priest textbook is Star-Crossed Lovers, the three songs dotted across the album to keep it fresh.

The other obvious influence is Iron Maiden, though Colón only tries a Bruce Dickinson impression on the title track. Maiden are all over the album in moments, as indeed are Priest, but these are a quartet of songs so rooted in their single influences that, like Helsinki Nights, it wouldn't actually surprise much if they turned out to be covers of songs that we've never heard before. What's very telling is that these pastiches are arguably the best songs here, along with the opener, Barbarians at the Gate, which storms into action like it's still 1985 and Savage Grace are leaping at the chance to delve into this newfangled speed metal thing.

The other songs are all decent, nothing letting the side down, but they're missing something that would elevate them to the same level as those I've already mentioned. They're the sort of songs I heard on a lot of Friday Rock Show sessions around the time that Savage Grace were at their peak that underlined how much potential a young band had and why someone really ought to sign them to a record deal. These would make it onto their debut album, probably hindered by poor production to remain an underrated cult favourite, but they'd be forgotten if a killer second or third album showed up because the band had held together long enough to make it.

And so that leaves Savage Grace as a cross between those two scenarios. Half of this feels like the songs that sound good but would be soon forgotten as a band builds, but the other half seems like the sort of material they turned out after they made it to their third album, which, of course, this is. Sure, it's been thirty-seven years since their second, but it's still a third album. Now they're on that milestone, back together as a coherent band and putting out decent material, let's see if the next couple will grow them into something more than a welcome return.

Tuesday, 9 May 2023

Holy Moses - Invisible Queen (2023)

I was a little surprised when I saw a new Holy Moses album being released in 2023, but I was also a very happy chappy indeed, because I loved what these guys were doing in the late eighties and I'd no idea at all that they were still around. It turns out that they continued until 1994, perhaps due to the changes wrought by grunge in the States not being quite so emphatic in Europe, and stayed gone until the new millennium, reforming in 2000 and adding five albums to the seven they put out during their original incarnation. However, this is their first in nine years, a long gap indeed for a generally prolific band.

Holy Moses play thrash metal in the Teutonic style, rooted in speed metal with rough but not harsh vocals. hardly surprising given that they're a German band from Aachen. I remember liking them a lot but I haven't heard them in decades and this reminds me just how unusual they were. For one, I remember them getting much more technical than many of their peers, with intricate guitarwork and instrumental passages that put them more in parity with Sieges Even and Mekong Delta than Destruction and Kreator. For another, they had a female vocalist, Sabina Classen, who's the one and only constant in the band throughout its lifetime.

Now, she wasn't alone, given that Doro was pioneering heavy female vocals with Warlock, but she was much rougher in delivery and became quite the pioneer, along with Ann Boleyn, Debbie Gunn and the late Dawn Crosby in the States. She's certainly one of the invisible queens of metal, from a time long before Angela Gossow shocked the world in 2000 when she took over as the lead vocalist of Arch Enemy, and she's sounding on the top of her game here. I ought to dive back into The New Machine of Liechtenstein after this review, with Finished with the Dogs as a tasty chaser. And then I should catch up with the far too many albums I haven't heard.

This sounds like Holy Moses from the outset, but a little more so in almost every regard. Classen is a little harsher than I remember, but not by much. Maybe she's just benefitting from 21st century production, given that the albums I loved are around thirty-five years old now and technology has moved on massively. The guitars, here played by Peter Geltat, seem more biting and more urgent, with possibly the same cause. Gerd Lücking keeps a little faster pace on drums, which is never bad in my book. I always like my thrash fast, even though Holy Moses manage midpace sections neatly as well.

The biggest difference between this and my possibly faulty memory is just how overt the basswork of Thomas Neitsch is. Like Geltat, he used to play for a thrash band from Berlin called Desilence, so may have brought him into the band, and they work together well. There are moments here where it sounds like he firmly believes that he's playing lead, which I'm never upset to hear a bass player do. The early gem is Cult of the Machine and he's all over that song like a rash, with a peach of an encore in Order Out of Chaos, before continuing in this vein throughout the album.

And, while I might prefer Cult of the Machine, Order Out of Chaos may be the defining song of the current state of Holy Moses. There are points where it feels like it's going to veer so wildly out of control that it's going to fail horribly any moment now, what with Neitsch soloing in one direction and Geltat in another, but it never does because these guys know exactly what they're doing and the result is something that had me throwing up my arms in admiration. It really is what it says on the label—order out of chaos—and that's the defining message of the album. Invisible Queen is a worthy and appropriate title, but Order Out of Chaos may have been better still.

There's a lot more to come, because the title track shows up next and that's only marks a third of the way through a dozen songs. What's more, there's an edition with a second disc that covers all the same ground but with guest vocalists. I haven't listened to it yet because I'm concentrating on the album proper, but I will because it features a teasing list of replacements for the one constant in the band, an interesting approach indeed.

The most obvious are fellow German thrash legends, Tom Angelripper and Andreas Geremia from Sodom and Tankard respectively, but Bobby Ellsworth of Overkill and Jens Kidman of Meshuggah get a track each too, and there's a string of modern female vocalists who owe plenty to Classen's blazing of the trail, like Marloes Voskuil of Izegrim (now Haliphron), Diva Satanica of Bloodhunter, Rægina of Dæmonesq and, most obviously, Dani Karrer of German thrash band Headshot.

Not everything is up to those openers and I'd say that the most obvious highlights all arrive early on the album, but nothing lets the side down and everything is enjoyable and refreshing, with so many other German thrash bands making firm departures from their sound lately. This sounds like Holy Moses throughout and it's agreeably uncompromising about that. Outcasts and Too Far Gone are the closest on the second side to matching the early highlights of the first. Like the Choose the Juice album before it, I think I have to go with an 8/10 here, because it's definitely closer to it than it is to a 7. And I think it's growing on me more with each listen. Welcome back, folks!

Wednesday, 9 November 2022

Venom Inc. - There's Only Black (2022)

Country: UK
Style: Heavy/Speed Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 23 Sep 2022
Sites: Facebook | Instagram | Metal Archives | Official Website | Twitter

This second Venom Inc. album prompts a brief history lesson; if you already know this, then skip on to the next paragraph. The pivotal line-up of extreme metal pioneers Venom was Cronos, Abaddon and Mantas, the line-up that recorded Welcome to Hell and Black Metal, among others. However, while Cronos leads the current incarnation of Venom, he actually left in 1988, leaving control with Abaddon who brought Mantas back into the fold in 1989, along with Tony Dolan of Atomkraft. That line-up recorded Prime Evil and others and, after Cronos returned and took control, they formed a new band, Venom, Inc., to continue the Prime Evil era. Abaddon has since left again and the drums here are played by Jeramie Kling, as War Machine. Dolan is Demolition Man. Mantas is, well, still Mantas.

What that means is that there are now two incarnations of Venom: one led by Cronos and this one by Mantas. Abaddon is off doing his own thing, with an EP released earlier this year. I've seen the Venom incarnation live—holy crap, was that sixteen years ago?— and they blistered then, though the (lack of) production hinders their studio releases, like 2018's Storm the Gates. This album has much better production—just listen to that crisp drum sound at the beginning of The Dance—and, though it's less extreme and more traditional heavy metal, there are plenty of moments to whisk you back to old school Venom.

Certainly early songs like Infinite and Come to Me do everything that old school Venom did. They storm out of the gate and barrel along at a rate of knots. Mantas's riffs include a lot of rhythmic chugging, while Dolan's voice is effectively in our faces, even if it can't match Cronos for iconically demonic. Every aspect is controlled well, aided by that crisp production, so that this seems like it's just easy for them and they could play all night. They're not the fastest songs in the world, but they do blister and I can imagine how they'd feel live with a serious sound system.

The title track slows the tempo a little, which serves to remind us as much of Motörhead as Venom, as if we hadn't noticed how much the latter had taken from the former anyway. It also reminds us that Venom were never the fastest or most extreme band out there, even in their most influential days, and were influential for other reasons, like punk/metal attitude and lyrical content. In 2022, they have to rely on that all the more and it's the attitude that sells the more emphatic songs like Don't Feed Me Your Lies or Burn Liar Burn.

I come to Venom Inc. from an unusual place. I adore the Black Metal album and I love the tracks on this album that feel closest to that sound, songs like Man as God and Nine. However, I encountered Venom first through At War with Satan and I still have a real fondness for that twenty minute title track, an attempt by the band to highlight how they could truly play, even if they preferred to dish out a succession of three minute blitzkriegs. There's a lot going on in that piece and I hear a lot of it on this album, even if it's mostly in intros and breakdowns. Burn Liar Burn and The Dance spring quickly to mind. In fact, Burn Liar Burn's intro extends to half the song and it's fascinating before it launches into a full on speed metal assault.

Inevitably, I find that I have to compare this to the most recent Venom album and it comes off as a step up. There was good material on Storm the Gates but there was a lot of filler too and the awful production made everything sound terrible. This easily wins out on production but it wins out from the standpoints of songwriting and consistency too. It's not Black Metal or even At War with Satan but it's a good, reliable album with some standout tracks to elevate it further. And it sounds damn good. Now I understand why a number of fans have been telling me that Venom Inc. are the better band right now. The ball's in your court, Cronos. Let's have a killer new Venom album!

Friday, 7 October 2022

Razor - Cycle of Contempt (2022)

Here's another blast from the past, this time from Canada, from the Ontario city of Guelph where I have some good old friends. Razor are kind of like good old friends too, given that my first Razor album was Evil Invaders back in 1985. I enjoyed them for a few years, nothing later matching that album but still enjoyable, but I lost track of them after Violent Restitution in 1988, as real life had sudden demands on my time. It was good to see their name crop up again as I thought they'd been gone for years. And they kind of had been, given that this is their first album since 1997, which is a quarter of a century. Welcome back, folks!

Nowadays, the line-up features two founder members. One is Dave Carlo on guitar, whose riffs are less biting than they used to be because he's warmed up his sound, but he's as good as ever and his solos still rip. The other is Mike Campagnalo, whose rumbling bass underpins the Razor sound and gives the rest of the band something solid to build on. He gets a few spotlight moments, whether that's during a pause for effect, where he rumbles along on his own, or in an intro like Punch Your Face In.

The new fish is Rider Johnson, who's on his second stint with the band, even though he didn't join until 2014. He's solid, whether playing slowly during the first half of Darkness Falls or at the more usual frantic pace of a speed metal band. In between is Bob Reid, who joined in 1989, so has been a mainstay in the band ever since I stopped listening. That's coincidence, of course, but it's telling, as he seems to be the biggest reason why this album is happening, being the driving force behind the Razor reunion in 1997, and my least favourite aspect to it.

He does what he does well, but it's not what I expect from a speed metal band. The lead vocalist in my day was Stace "Sheepdog" McLaren, who left because he'd lost his passion for being in a band, leading Reid to take over not only behind the mike but as the impetus behind the band continuing to function. McLaren had a wild voice that I'd say is more suited to the genre, rough and raw and as willing to scream as squeal or whatever other vocalisation is needed at any particular moment. To me, Reid has a more focused approach that's primarily aggressive, perhaps appropriate for a post-Pantera world.

That's backed up by the lyrics, which are primarily in your face aggressive and delivered with an in your face aggressive attitude. Remember the insane scream at the beginning of The Marshall Arts that was a statement of intent on the Violent Restitution album? That sort of thing isn't here because Reid isn't into that. He's into threatening to punch you in the face, whether that's conversationally in the closer, King Shit, or through the strictly regimented cadence of most of these songs. He fits with the lyrics, but the lyrics aren't exactly subtle, as you'll find in Jabroni, Punch Your Face In, All Fist Fighting, Off Your Meds, Crossed... well, pretty much all of them. This is fight music.

If what Reid does is your sort of thing, then you're going to be happy with this album, because he does what he does consistently throughout. If you came to thrash from punk, you may love this. If you came to thrash from NWOBHM, maybe not so much. I found that his approach led to an album that's one note and I wanted a lot more variety. It was at its best for me when it was instrumental, so my favourite song is easily the title track, being a couple of minutes longer than the norm, thus allowing for a couple of minutes of glorious riffing to kick it off and a strong instrumental section for solos in the second half.

After that, I'd probably go for All Fist Fighting, because Reid speeds up his delivery and makes it a lot more urgent and passionate. He still uses his rough but powerful punk voice but it feels real to me, instead of a rehearsed threat intended to prod someone into throwing the first punch. It's the difference between Anthrax with Joey Belladonna (or even Neil Turbin) and Anthrax behind Billy Milano. As much as I enjoyed Speak English or Die, I'm always going to go for the former and this is an album for those who want the latter.

So it's a 6/10 from me, I think. The band are solid and tight and still agreeably fast and I'm gleeful that they're back, but I think they've moved a little away from me.

Tuesday, 4 October 2022

Witchery - Nightside (2022)

Country: Sweden
Style: Blackened Thrash/Speed Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 22 Jul 2022
Sites: Facebook | Instagram | Metal Archives | Wikipedia

If you haven't heard Witchery before, I highly recommend checking out their cover of Restless and Wild that opened up their Witchburner EP in 1999. Beyond the cleverly meta opening that one ups the Accept original, it says almost everything that you'll need to know about this bunch of Swedes, who are on their eighth studio album. They're one of those bands who are always reliable, both in consistent quality and in lack of variance from their previous work. This isn't particularly different from earlier Witchery albums, though it's often slower than I remember them being, but it's solid nonetheless.

I do like my Witchery fast, so my favourite songs are the ones that ratchet up the tempo the most. Witching Hour starts out proceedings at a promising pace, if not at lightspeed, and it sounds good to me, Angus Norder's vocals an evil snarl of a growl. He's new to me, because he joined in 2016 in time for their sixth album, In His Infernal Majesty's Service, and I haven't heard either that or its swift follow-up, I am Legion in 2017. He's their fourth vocalist and he's deeper in tone than the one I remember, Tony Kampner aka Toxine, but just as effective.

There are a few fast songs here. Popecrusher and Churchburner are as uncompromising titles as I would describe their sound, that word a quintessential one to use to describe Witchery. Under the Altar starts and ends blistering, but varies its tempo throughout for impressive effect. A Forest of Burning Coffins is the punkiest track the band have to offer this time out, which unfolds with that Accept on speed mindset and it surely has to be my favourite song here. For the more traditional Accept sound, check out the solo in the second half of Crucifix and Candle.

I should add that A Forest of Burning Coffins includes a full stop on a dime that's absolutely pristine too, an effective way to highlight how tight this band remains, even with only two founder members left and a new bassist in Victor Brandt, who replaced Sharlee d'Angelo, another founder member, earlier this year. Those originals, by the way, are the guitarists, Patrik Jensen and Richard Rimfält, who goes more subtly by Richard Corpse.

Don't Burn the Witch and Storm of the Unborn are mid-tempo, as is Left Hand March, whose name highlights why some of these tracks are slower. They feel like marches, because they may be slower than the highlights but they're as heavy and as in your face, a militaristic rhythm maintaining the impact, even with a hint of what sound like keyboards midway. That's not a typical sound for them.

Neither are the monks chanting behind Er steht in Flammen, but this one serves as an interlude, a plain chant texture sitting behind what sound like preparations for burning a witch to death, told in both German and English. This band do stick to their theme pretty consistently. It's a rare song that isn't about witches, fire or the oppressions of the Christian church and many of them could be argued to be about all three. Even as an interlude, it's longer than Under the Altar, which is ninety seconds of instrumental fun.

And really there's not a heck of a lot more to say. You're either going to like Witchery or you won't. If you do, they're never going to let you down, because every album is going to feature an array of uncompromising—I can't leave that word alone when talking about Witchery—slabs of the kind of metal that scared your siblings when you were growing up. If you don't, then this won't convince you otherwise. It is what it is, just like the cover art is overly simple but still does everything that it's tasked to do.

Friday, 16 September 2022

Midnight - Let There Be Witchery (2022)

Country: USA
Style: Black/Speed Metal
Rating: 6/10
Release Date: 4 Mar 2022
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | Metal Archives | Official Website

Athenar, the jack of all trades who is the entirety of Midnight in a studio environment, is ahead of himself with this album, because it's only two years since the previous one, Rebirth by Blasphemy, and everyone knows that Midnight albums arrive like clockwork every three years. Maybe that's a positive impact of the COVID pandemic, a pleasant side effect to the unpleasant lack of touring of the last couple of years. Whatever the reason, I'm happy, because I like Midnight.

I should clarify that I like the other Midnight better, the live Midnight that expands the line-up by hiring a couple more musicians and blitzes through their set like a punk-infused speed metal band getting paid by the song, so they'd better finish this one quickly and start up another. I like what I hear from studio Midnight too, but they're a lot slower. These songs may end up as still more punk-infused speed metal on stage but, on virtual vinyl, they're more akin to proto-extreme metal, the sort of thing I was so enthralled by in the early to mid eighties as bands developed the sounds that would grow into black metal and death metal and what have you.

The most obvious examples of that this time out is Nocturnal Molestation, which is a catchy combo of Venom and Hellhammer, and Let There Be Sodomy, which features Athenar's most recognisable Cronos impression against a Teutonic power/speed metal backdrop. I dug both of these, of course, because this sort of thing is my happy place, taking me back to my introduction to everything rock and metal all at once, courtesy of Tommy Vance's Friday Rock Show, in 1984 and 1985.

The catch is that, nostalgia aside, the genre has moved on rather a long way since then and I can't honestly say that Athenar does this better than anyone else. This isn't Black Metal, let alone what spawned from it, and it frequently makes me think of Cronos way back in 1979, when Venom were a completely unheared of nightmare of a band, figuring out just how raw and deviant he could make the Motörhead sound. Songs like Devil Virgin could have been on a Venom demo a year later. And I came in with At War with Satan, so I knew how far that sound could go. Midnight don't go that far.

Half of me appreciates what Athenar does with Midnight, because he's utterly reliable. He churns out another ten songs every three, ahem two, years that are pretty akin to the ten on his previous album and the one before that. They sound good, especially if the revolutionary years in the early eighties in the UK and parts of the continent are special times for you. However, even if they were, you're going to be well aware that what was revolutionary then isn't revolutionary today and that realisation is the biggest downside to what Midnight do.

There are other bands out there trawling that same source material but they're doing it in a more contemporary fashion, bringing the sound up to date, even if it remains fundamentally old school. Athenor apparently has no interest in doing that at all, so Midnight sound less vibrant—on record—than bands like Reaper and Inculter and Bütcher, even an old school band like Sodom, given their most recent album. I highlighted "on record" because I've seen Midnight live and I know how much they blister on stage, but that's a different Midnight to what Athenor gets up to in the studio.

What that boils down to is that, if you know Midnight already, this is more of the same, but, if you don't, this is as good as any album to start out on. It'll do the same job as the others. If you want a sample first, check out Nocturnal Molestation or Snake Obsession or Let There Be Sodomy first on YouTube. If you like them, you'll like everything else. Maybe, for something just a little different, I would suggest More Torment, because it's Midnight as a slow and lumbering heavy metal monster in search of food. But variety isn't what you'll get here. You'll get Venom in 1980. And, if that's not a birthday present for you, knock a point of my rating.

Wednesday, 20 July 2022

Holy Dragons - Jörmungandr: The Serpent of the World (2022)

This may be a surprising album to show up as my second review of the day, given that I try to post a new and often indie band first but follow up with an established and well known outfit. So who are Holy Dragons, because I hadn't heard of them before and you may well not have done either? Well, they've been around since 1995 under this name—and were known as Axcess for a few more years before that—and this is between their sixteenth and twentieth album, depending on how we count. I think a few may be re-recordings of earlier albums with new singers. Whatever the number, they certainly count as established and it would seem that the Kazakh metal scene started with them.

I really dig this album, but it's a couple of different things rolled into one and it takes a little while to get used to that. For a start, the best thing about the band at present is surely the guitarwork, which is prominent and outstanding. Jürgen Thunderson and Chris Caine, usually called Thorheim, are both founder members, though the latter wasn't in Axcess before that. I'd state that, however much I enjoyed any particular song here, every single one of them is elevated at the point that the rhythm section settles into a groove and Thunderson and Caine trade solos with each other. I could listen to The Toothless Wolf forever. Even bassist Ivan Manchenko gets in on the act.

These guitars are firmly rooted in heavy/power metal and often acquire a speed metal edge when they shift into solo territory. The biggest shift I heard was when Somebody's Life showcases an old school AC/DC style riff, right out of the Bon Scott era, but everything else here is pretty consistent in approach. However, even when soloing fast, Thunderson and Caine never lose sight of melody, a potent combination and one that I've adored since I found rock and metal in 1984. However, I must add that, while Caine has been playing guitar in Holy Dragons since 1995, she didn't step up to the mike until 2015, suggesting that she's far more comfortable as a guitarist than a vocalist.

And that makes sense, given that she sounds more accomplished as a guitarist than a vocalist. I'd better mention here that I really dig her vocals, but they're not going to be for everyone, because her shriller, more emphatic take on the Doro style works better the faster they go and the fastest bits here are instrumental sections, when she's wearing her guitarist hat. I think that fans of the pure heavy metal style that don't like speed metal may find her voice too raucous for them, while speed metal fans will love her voice but wish the band would speed up to match it. It's people like me who appreciate both styles and remember Doro when she was Doro Pesch, the lead singer for Warlock, that will dig this, even if we take a song or two to adjust.

I believe this is a concept album that spins a story out of the rich vein of storytelling in Norse myth. If it isn't, that's certainly a common theme. Certainly Jörmungandr is straight out of the Eddas, as the sea serpent who surrounds the Earth. It's a child of Loki, another title here; a sibling of Fenrir, the Toothless Wolf of that song. When Jörmungandr lets its tail go, it'll be time for Ragnarok that will take place at the field called Vígríðr, the name of the intro here. The outro is Iðavöllr, which, like Midgard in another song title, are places and, well, everything here ties in somehow.

I didn't follow the concept as it ran through, but I appreciated the music, in the vocal sections and especially in the instrumental ones. Manchenko and drummer Zabir Shamsutdinov provide a solid backdrop for Thunderson and Caine to strut their stuff and they do that well. This album squeaks a second past a full hour and I didn't find it remotely long. I could listen to these guitar solos all day every day. This is old school stuff, reminding of Warlock, Exciter and Detente. It's not what most of the metal bands in the world are playing but that's just another plus point for me. And now you're familiar with the biggest metal band in Kazakhstan. You're welcome.

Monday, 18 July 2022

Armory - Mercurion (2022)

I should admit from the start that, even though I'm rating this 7/10 from a critical standpoint, this is so far up my alley that I haven't been listening to anything else for a couple of days and it needs to move on so I can review something else. Armory are a speed metal band from Gothenburg and, as perhaps you expect from their chosen genre, they play things old school. They're a decade into their career and this is their third full length, a sci-fi concept album because apparently everyone is into making concept albums nowadays and I missed the memo.

It's not just the science fiction side of this that prompts comparisons to Agent Steel, because they are all over the opening track, Message from the Stars, and, while not everything here follows in their footsteps, some of it clearly does, perhaps most obviously Deep Space Encounter, especially after the opening solo. The vocals of Konstapel P. are lower than those of John Cyriis, of course, though some higher notes are reminiscent, not least the very first one on Message from the Stars, and they're rougher as well, perhaps midway between Cyriis and John Connolly of Nuclear Assault. The guitars of G. G. Sundin and Ingelman, however, are right out of the Agent Steel playbook and they are the greatest success of this album.

In fact, I get caught up in those guitars so much that I keep forgetting to take notes. I keep putting the album on afresh, hearing that Agent Steel comparison and suddenly acknowledging that forty-two minutes have passed and I need to start over. I'm not falling prey to outside distraction. It isn't dropping into the background. I'm falling prey to inside distraction because it's the band doing it. I can't complain from the standpoint of a listener but it doesn't help me as a critic!

While most of this is pure speed metal, technical and intricate but mostly put in place to serve the need for speed, it's not all breakneck stuff. There are plodders like Journey into Infinity, and many slower sections in many songs where the band shift a gear or three down but remain technical and intricate. The guitarwork drives everything here, though it's reliant on the tight rhythm section of Anglegrinder on bass and Space Ace on drums, who sets the tone in the album's earliest moments. There are more interesting touches too, here and there, as parts of the story require them.

The most obvious is the way that Void Prison begins, because it sounds like the beats are built out of the sounds of a space age prison gate being firmly shut with us on the wrong side. Other intros are simpler but often just as effective, like the way that we're sucked into Transneptunic Flight as if we just leapt into hyperspace. There are odd narrative sections, but none get in the way, and an occasional choral part too, especially late in Event Horizon. In its way, the space war in the middle of Deep Space Encounter is a narration too, but it's told with keyboards rather than voice.

The most interesting stuff is reserved for the second half of the album and I'd say that the variety ramps up all the way to the fascinating way that Event Horizon ends, as if each musician wraps up their part in proceedings in turn and then proceeds over some threshold that takes them into the unknown. Maybe we'll learn something about what's beyond that threshold on their next album. I have no doubt that John Cyriis is watching the skies so he can keep an eye out for their return.

It's the final two songs that get really interesting. There's power metal in Music from the Spheres, both in vocal lines and slower sections, a nod to someone like Gamma Ray, even if they play a much smaller role here than Agent Steel. That song also features some keyboard swells right out of the seventies, which feels odd given that Armory are otherwise so rooted in the early to mid eighties. There are Megadeth riffs on Event Horizon and it flirts with prog metal often, right to the end.

And I'll shut up now because I just want to immerse myself in this album again. I think that 7/10 is a fair rating, but speed metal freaks like me will want to add another point and interpret that as an 8/10. I must be on my tenth or twelfth time through and it's not getting old. In fact I keep catching new little details each time through, even if I'm too engaged to write them down. Perhaps I will up this to an 8/10 at some point after all.

Tuesday, 14 June 2022

Reaper - Viridian Inferno (2022)

Country: Australia
Style: Black/Speed Metal
Rating: 6/10
Release Date: 22 Apr 2022
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | Metal Archives

Melbourne-based Reaper tend to be listed as black/speed metal and there's truth to that, but the sound they conjure up goes back to the proto-extreme era. I'm not hearing black metal bands here but I am hearing all the pioneers here. The album begins with an early Bathory groove in Shadow of the Crucifix and stays there for a while, adding a Venom sense of urgency in faster sections and telegraphing of when those will show up, like on the intro to Drop of the Blade. This isn't as fast as you'd expect from a band labelled speed metal but it is always urgent, even in slower sections. By the end of the album, they've also trawled in Celtic Frost, especially on Internal Torment, which is the closer.

The other influences I heard are out of punk rather than metal. Taste the Blood speeds up a little more than the opening couple of tracks before it, but it feels very much like the songwriters were listening to bands like Discharge and GBH as well as those proto-extreme metal bands. As the song gets bouncy in its second half, the metal side reenforces itself, but it never loses the punk attitude and rawness, which, of course, Bathory took and ran with. Given all this, I frankly expected to catch a lot of Motörhead but that influence kept itself hidden, most obvious in the bass on like Nothing Left to Waste, and that surprised me. Lemmy's here more than Motörhead.

Given the band's choice to go with this sort of sound, I also expected them to be older musicians, a group of like minded fans who remember these particular good old days and got together to make new music that could have come out back then, but that doesn't seem to be the case. They clearly aren't teenagers but they're also clearly at least a generation younger than I am, so they weren't around listening to those pioneering albums when they came out. I wonder where the impetus for this sound came from, because I'm sure there are stories there.

Initially the most obvious component in this sound is the utterly raw and raucous voice of Shannon Styles, who bears as much comparison to people like Blaine from the Accüsed and George Anthony of Battalion of Saints as to Quorthon of Bathory. However, as the album runs on and especially on repeat listens, it's the bass of Rebecca Tovey that becomes most notable. Partly because that bass is so high in the mix and partly because the guitar is downtuned close enough to it, it tends to take over songs. Sure, that's guitar feedback kicking off Nothing Left to Waste but the bass takes over so much that we almost forget that the guitar's there. It's Tovey who drives this band.

I liked the dirtiness of the sound from the outset, but it took a little longer for the songs to take a hold of me and, after a few listens, they started to drift away again. That left me in an odd place of liking the album more than the tracks on it, if that makes sense. I don't feel much need to play any of these songs over others, even the best of them, like The Reaper or Taste the Blood, but I do feel like I could pull the album out now and again to immerse myself in its sound. There's a griminess to it that really takes me back.

It reminds me of underground gigs in the late eighties in tiny, sweaty venues in Bradford or Leeds featuring bands who weren't particularly notable but blistered for half an hour nonetheless, then wandered off to the bar. I almost wandered off to flick through the stack of albums someone must have been selling at the back, by an array of bands I've never heard of but had "pay no more than" on the cover and inserts in them exploring the evils of eating meat or experimenting on animals. I bought a bunch of them, even if I stopped for a burger on the way home. This could have been one.

Monday, 6 December 2021

ADX - Étranges visions (2021)

It seems like about ten minutes since I reviewed the last ADX album, Bestial, but COVID is messing with my internal clock because that was actually last January, almost two years ago now. This one was made by the same line-up, with the pair of founder members who have always stayed with the band throughout its history still there: vocalist Phil Grélaud and drummer Didier Bouchard. This is similar but arguably a little better.

I liked the opening song proper, Le sang de l'ennemi, which kicks off in lively heavy metal style and then ratchets up the gears to something closer to speed metal. There are some tight changes and the twin guitars of Nicklaus Bergen and a gentleman who only goes by Neo are woven together in stylish fashion. I find that I like my ADX when they're playing at speed and this one delivers in just the way I like it: clean, speedy and technical. Génération perdue lowers the speed a little but adds more changes. The buzzsaw guitarwork that kicks off Sacrificé pour la cause took me right back.

They slow down a little after that and I have to admit that I got distracted and didn't get hijacked back in again until the closer, another fast song called Invasion. Listening through a second time, I realised that there's good stuff here in between but we have to pay a little more attention. After another time, I found that Guerre mystique, a lively instrumental in the vein of Iron Maiden that oddly turns out to be the longest piece of music on offer here at almost six minutes, may actually be my favourite track.

Now, that shouldn't surprise me much, as I'm not the world's biggest fan of Grélaud's vocals, but I don't have anything against them. He does what he does well. I just think that his particular style of punk-infused metal vocals, which, to be fair, he's been delivering to ADX since 1982, has become a little generic in the decades since. He accompanies really well, but he doesn't stand out notably above his peers, in a genre where many iconic vocalists do exactly that. Now, is that a good thing or a bad thing? That depends on your tastes. To mine, he could be a little higher in the mix too.

I should also add that one of the reasons that I realised that I prefer ADX in instrumental mode to the ADX with vocals is because they go instrumental rather often. These songs aren't particularly long, the longest at the five minute and change level and many a minute shorter, but most have a solid instrumental midsection and some of those are a lot more than solid. I'd call out Le reflet du Mal and especially the characterful Terre de colère here, along with those faster earlier songs.

It's probably fair to mention that these French titles are more traditional metal fare than Bestial and its horror themed material. The best songs translate to Blood of the Enemy, Mystical War, The Reflection of Evil and Land of Wrath. The English titled Trouble is excellent too, if an instrumental intro to Invasion, which, of course, is the same in French and English. The album title (and name of the neat intro) means Strange Visions, so maybe there's a little more fantasy going on here.

I only gave Bestial a 6/10, which is still a recommended rating, as I rarely review any albums that I don't recommend, but this one's a safe 7/10. It's good to see ADX getting busier in their third stint as a band and still turning out solid and reliable albums. And, that said, now I need to check out their 1990 album, Weird Visions, because it looks rather similar to this. Is this really new material or a re-recorded version in their native French? I'm leaning towards the latter.

Tuesday, 13 July 2021

Helloween - Helloween (2021)

I've been a fan of Helloween since I heard Metal Invaders on the Death Metal sampler that Noise put out back in 1984. Hellhammer and Helloween? Hell yeah. And Running Wild too! Whatever happened to Dark Avenger? Anyway, I followed them through Walls of Jericho and the Keeper of the Seven Keys albums, which just kept on getting better and better, but I wasn't as enthused by Pink Bubbles Go Ape, much preferring Heading for Tomorrow, the debut from Gamma Ray, formed by guitarist Kai Hansen when he left Helloween. When singer Michael Kiske left too in 1993, I drifted away and I can't say that I've heard any of the further dozen albums the band has put out.

Until now, that is, and I'm paying attention to this one not just because that's why I set up Apocalypse Later Music to begin with, but because, for the first time since Keeper of the Seven Keys Part II in 1988, both Hansen and Kiske are back in the band. That means two lead vocalists now, because Andi Deris, who replaced Kiske in 1994, is still in the line-up. Hansen sings too, as well as lending his guitar to the fray, alongside Sascha Gerstner, his replacement's replacement, who's been there since 2002, and, of course, founder member Michael Weikath, who never left the band. The prospect of Helloween with a pair of lead vocalists and a three-pronged guitar assault, is irresistible.

I don't believe that this album quite lives up to that set up, but it takes a damn good shot at doing so and its best moments are easily up there with the best they've ever done. Skyfall, the twelve minute epic that closes out the album, is a real peach and there are plenty of highlights before it shows up to take the running time over an hour. I've listened through three times thus far and know that I have to repeat at least as much to fully grasp what's going on here.

Out for the Glory and Fear of the Fallen kick things off as the band means to go on. They hearken back to the band's Keeper of the Seven Keys heyday with high, soaring melodies over speed metal backing. As you might expect from Helloween, there's also a lot of dynamic play going on in both, perhaps even more in Fear of the Fallen than Out for the Glory, which has over seven minutes to explore. It even has a narrative section courtesy of journalist Xavier Russell. "Come now, there's not a moment to waste," he states, and they don't. There's a glorious vocal back and forth midway through the song, the solos are fantastic and the choruses are quintessential Helloween.

Best Time is just as interesting, though it's slower and the verses are oddly often reminiscent of Billy Idol. Angels is slower still and much more introspective, but it ramps up impressively by the end. Rise without Chains kicks back into tempo and Indestructible adds the heaviest riff thus far. There are cool strings on Down in the Dumps. All these songs in the middle of the album are worthy, but none are up to the quality of the first two or, indeed, the last one. They're why this is a 7/10 review instead of 8 or 9 as the bookends deserve.

And to that final song. It's the epic of the album, but it's even more epic if we add in Orbit, which has a track number of its own but is really an interlude between the album and Skyfall, as well as an intro to that final track, so I'm seeing it as over thirteen minutes of glory that any heavy/power metal fan will revel in. Helloween have never really gone away since they were founded in Hamburg in 1983 but they are emphatically back nonetheless and the future is bright, as underlined by the fact that this is their first self-titled release since their excellent debut EP in 1985. "Yesterday is history," they sing on Best Time, "tomorrow is a mystery." I'm looking forward to it.

Monday, 31 May 2021

Goat Rider - Tsundere (2021)

Country: Costa Rica
Style: Black/Speed Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 29 May 2021
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | Metal Archives | YouTube

I found this as a speed metal album, but it's really a cross between black and speed metal with a punk attitude, kind of like Midnight, who were quite the surprise when I saw them supporting Kreator and Obituary. They're an absolute blitzkrieg on stage and I'm guessing that Goat Rider, who hail from San José in Costa Rica, follow suit. They just don't mess around here, unless we count the intro as messing around. There are ten tracks proper here and there are as many under three minutes as over. There's a cover of a Toxic Holocaust song on their debut album, High Speed from Hell, and that fits too.

While this band are from South America, they clearly have a fondness for Japan. The album's title is a reference to a type of anime character who has two distinct moods: one cold and aloof, the other hot and temperamental. The intro is full of Japanese instruments, like kotos and shakuhachi flutes. There are songs here called Katana, Kamikaze and Hentai, not to forget Harakiri at WWII, all of which cover quintessentially Japanese topics. There are plenty of little snippets that I presume are samples which serve to underline this connection too, as does the stylistic cover art.

Musically, they're not Japanese in the slightest. The roots here are initially English, starting with the mighty Motörhead, an influence that's especially obvious on songs like Necromancer and Harakiri at WWII, the latter of which plays out rather like Orgasmatron for quite a while. Following as an obvious influence is Venom, for reasons of speed and harsh vocal delivery but also because not everything here is speed. Most of these songs don't leave the gate at 100mph and not all of them get up to that, though many do. Goat Rider would have been seen as fast and edgy had they also recorded for Neat Records in the early eighties but they're not as fast and edgy today, given what's happened in the decades between. A song like Flagellator ends up very much in Venom territory.

The eagle eyed would notice that both the bands cited above were, at least at their most influential, power trios, as are Toxic Holocaust and, on stage, Midnight. Goat Rider aren't, because they number four members, but they sound like they are because the music is generated from one guitar, one bass and one set of drums. The only way they're bucking that trend is that vocalist Anthony Umaña, or his musical nom de plume of Cvnt Deströyer, is only the vocalist and he doesn't do double duty on bass. A power trio in this genre has a very recognisable sound, with the bass as obvious as the lead guitar, as often it serves the role of rhythm guitar. A band like Bütcher, who would otherwise work as a further comparison, sound deeper and denser because they have two guitarists.

My favourite songs here are found at the heart of the album. With the Japanese connection firmly in place through the intro and tracks like Fire Rain and Katana, they show just how well they can blister on Satanic Speed Samurai, which title is a really good description of the band on this album, and just how well they can maintain that energy level while not playing incredibly fast throughout on Too Fast for You, which certainly spends much of its time very fast indeed but also slows down very effectively too for a late section. I also love the late pause, as the band wait for a single cymbal note before they enter the final stretch and dive for the line.

With the understanding that this is what it is, and it's not trying to be some higher form of art, there really isn't much negative to say. I'd have liked a thicker sound but I wouldn't suggest the production is flawed; it's just a consequence of being a power trio (plus vocalist). I'd have liked a few more songs too, because this runs a short 33 minutes, but it's kind of appropriate for the musical style. Certainly, we don't need hour long black/speed metal albums. If I want more, I should splash out for the band's debut album, which makes this one look long, given that it wraps up in under 25 minutes.

Of course, with albums running this short, Goat Rider really don't have much excuse not to knock out a fresh one every year for us to tune back in and exercise our necks for a while. This particular combo of genres is a relatively limited one stylistically, even if I really dig it, and Goat Rider have found a clever way of keeping it interesting, with samurai slashing the swords and anime girls crying out phrases still faster than the music. I'd love to see these guys live on stage too. It's only a three thousand mile drive with four borders to cross. During COVID. Yeah, maybe YouTube for now.

Thursday, 22 April 2021

Agent Steel - No Other Godz Before Me (2021)

I have to say that I've been looking forward to this album possibly more than any other this year. I was absolutely blown away by the debut Agent Steel album, Skeptics Apocalypse, in 1985 and I've never let it drift too far from my playlist ever since. They were a speed metal band based in Los Angeles and the album was blisteringly fast with no end of glorious riffs and the unusually high vocals of John Cyriis, a man who may have been batshit insane, given everything I've read about him and what he wrote in his lyrics, which are all about alien conspiracy theories, but was undeniably talented. His first album with Agent Steel in thirty-four years is something I want to hear! So what's it like?

Half of me loves it, though it's not Skeptics Apocalypse or even Unstoppable Force. The band are tight and forty minutes of their speed metal is glorious. Nikolay Atanasov and Vinicius Carvalho provide a glorious twin guitar assault and the rhythm section is solid as a rock, even if Rasmus Kjær galloping along like there's no tomorrow is a lot more obvious than Shuichi Oni, who's a bit low in the mix, though he does get some moments on Outer Space Connection. The riffs are great. The solos are great. The urgency of the drumming is great. This is why I love speed metal so much.

The other half of me realises that there are some major problems here and Cyriis is most of them. His voice has always been high but he used to sing at a lower pitch and go up when needed. His screams on songs like 144,000 Gone or Bleed for the Godz are legendary and they still sound amazing today, but he spends most of this album in the stratosphere, leading us to wonder if he's actually singing on helium. What's more, there are so many points where he adds more flourishes behind his voice, so effectively duetting with himself, that he ends up all over this album like a rash and with much the same effect.

So how do I quantify this? This could have been great stuff and it still is in many ways, but it needed to have John Cyriis singing on it. And I mean the John Cyriis from 1985 not this Stepford Wife pod person John Cyriis from 2021. This John Cyriis is too much and too often. Quite honestly, he spoils much of this album and he does it quickly enough that I got tired of him even during my first listen. That feels odd to admit, given that it's Cyriis's presence here that makes this Agent Steel and it's his return I was so looking forward to. Now I find myself hoping for an instrumental version.

The musicians joined up over a couple of years, after Cyriis put the band back together in 2018, and I'd be remiss in pointing out that they're from all over the globe. Guitarist Nikolay Atsanov is Bulgarian, though he lives in Denmark, where he also plays with Prophecy. He duels with Vinicius Carvalho, who's Brazilian and also has other bands down there, like A Red Nightmare. Bassist Shuichi Ono is Japanese, though he performed in a Dutch band called Stellar Seed with one Max A. Havlock, who turns out to be John Cyriis, who I believe is actually Brazilian himself, even if his origins are weirdly obscured; we still can't be sure of his real name. That leaves Rasmus Kjær on drums, who's from Denmark and also plays with Disintegrated. Oddly, that means that this pioneering American band doesn't actually contain a single American any more.

So where am I at? Frankly, I could listen to this just as background music and be happier at the end of a day than when I started it. Songs like Carousel of Vagrant Souls and the title track kick in with so much glorious style and power that I found myself in speed metal heaven. These are the best instrumental intros I've heard since the last Gama Bomb album. However, I'm really disappointed in Cyriis. I think I have to go with an 8/10 for the music but then drop not one but two points for what he does on top of it. That saddens me.

Monday, 19 April 2021

Bewitcher - Cursed Be Thy Kingdom (2021)

I still haven't figured out quite how to describe what Bewitcher do. What usually gets conjured up is black/speed metal and that's only fair to a degree. The vocals of Unholy Weaver of Shadows & Incantations are definitely rooted in black metal, however punked up they are, and the lyrics are very much on the Satanic side. The music he plays with his two (count 'em; there's a drummer now) cohorts may have a speed edge to it but it's decreasing with each album. To me, they sound rather like Iron Maiden might have done in 1993 if they'd hired Schmier from Destruction to replace Bruce Dickinson instead of Blaze Bayley. Oh, and maybe cut down on the instrumental bits too so the songs end up shorter.

Now, I've seen Bewitcher live, just after their previous album, Under the Witching Cross, and it's clear that they speed up considerably on stage, so I won't complain about that speed metal tag, only point out that it's not that obvious on vinyl. Songs like Death Returns... and The Widow's Blade are upbeat but they wouldn't be the fastest songs on Powerslave or indeed the heaviest and I'd call that a heavy metal album rather than speed.

Of course, adherence to advertising standards aside, this is another good album and another pretty immediate one. You won't need multiple listens to grasp this. Like the best Maiden, this is energetic and infectious right out of the gate. If you don't like it immediately, you're not likely to like it ever. On the flipside, if you do, it's not going to grow much on future listens. It'll continue to sound good and the riffs and melodies will keep digging a little deeper into your brain, but that's about it. Your sixth listen isn't going to give you much that you didn't hear on your first time through.

What I got out of a second listen was a bit more focus on the influences that go beyond Maiden. That's who kicks off the album in Death Returns... and continues throughout, but the riffs in Satanic Magick Attack are a bit more taken from Saxon, there's some Motörhead in Electric Phantoms and Mystifier (White Night City) has a European feel to it. As far as I'm aware, all these songs are originals, except the closer, Sign of the Wolf, which is a Pentagram cover, but Mystifier sounds like it also ought to be a cover because it feels so familiar, maybe like a Hanoi Rocks song covered by Accept, who added some classical bits in the solos, and sung by Schmier.

When I saw them live, it was in between a local band, Varkan, and a couple of bands big enough to be touring nationally but aren't household names, Striker and Holy Grail. I actually liked these support bands most, because Varkan were interesting and Bewitcher wandered on stage and slayed without apparently even trying. To haul in a weird analogy, they're kind of like Kevin Smith talking about Star Wars. You could bump into him at 4am in a grocery store and he'll still hold forth on that subject with the same quality as one of his stage shows, just because it's always in his head.

If Bewitcher climbed out of a van with instruments strapped to their bodies and a PA system inherent in the air, they'd do exactly the same thing, because I get the impression that they're always switched on. They could have jammed this album in the 36 minutes it takes to play and continued on for another three hours. That's at once the best thing and the worst thing about it. It sounds effortlessly good because Bewitcher don't know how to not be good, but it doesn't sound special. Effortless is a double edged sword.

Thursday, 25 February 2021

Evil - Possessed by Evil (2021)

Country: Japan
Style: Heavy/Speed Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 9 Feb 2021
Sites: Facebook | Metal Archives | Official Website | Twitter | YouTube

Wow, that's a lo fi sound to kick off this album, with background hiss and rough, frantic drums which seem to be determined to keep up with a band that doesn't want to hold back. Then again, the band is called Evil, as simple a metal name as can be. Metal Archives lists nine other metal bands called Evil. I think the only other one formed within the last twenty years, which has actually released anything, is from Tunisia, where that name is probably quite the statement all on its own.

Then again, a 2021 band calling themselves Evil and releasing an album called Possessed by Evil (after a debut called Rites of Evil) is making a statement too. They're saying they're emphatically old school and we shouldn't expect anything modern. Certainly all the names I can conjure up date way back. The drums remind me of the earliest days of Sodom, the music is often pure NWOBHM; much of The Cycle of Pain and Raizin could almost sit on either of the Paul Di'Anno albums by Iron Maiden. At breakneck pace, like on Yaksa, named for their drummer, they're a combination of early Bathory and Possessed with speed metal solos.

In other words, this dates back either to NWOBHM days or the proto-extreme metal that grew out of it. And it isn't just the music that sounds like that, the production does too. While the sound is meaty and energetic, I could believe that Evil just showed up one day to the studio, hooked up all their gear, played these twelve songs off the cuff in 36 minutes and 45 seconds and, job done, went home again. I could even believe that the engineer just pressed record, waited for them to be done, ejected the tape and sent it to the plant to press. Oh, and no overdubs.

In a way, that kind of makes this kin to the most recent Sodom album, Genesis XIX, except they took a little time to rehearse and I'm sure those songs weren't all recorded on the first take. Here I'm not so sure. I'd say that I'm surprised to find that Evil are a four piece instead of a trio like Sodom, Raven or Venom, but then Sodom are four people nowadays too. They merely sound like a quintessential power trio setup who grew up listening to Motörhead and the bands they inspired.

I like this, but I'm an old school proto-extreme metal fan. I remember when albums started having the sort of track listing this one has: out of a dozen songs, Hell is in three of the titles and Evil four. Hell's Evil Bells, of course, has both. This isn't trying to be clever. It's trying to fit into a scene that arguably ended before these musicians were even born and doing a decent job of it. The only aspect here that's of later heritage is the vocals of Asura, who's also one of the two guitarists. He's a bit more extreme, I think, than even Bathory was doing back then, but his style fits the band well.

This is the sort of album that you don't need to hear first. If what I've said piques your interest, you'll be in seventh heaven with this. If it made you shrug and move on, then this isn't for you at all. This is for people who still spin those early Venom, Celtic Frost and Bathory records; who wish that Di'Anno still sang for Maiden and Possessed hadn't split up in 1987; or who got all nostalgic hearing that last Sodom album. Sure, some songs are certainly better than others, and I'd suggest the first half is a lot better than the second, but it won't matter. If you're on board, you'll love it anyway. If not, you won't.

Friday, 22 March 2024

Tuesday, 7 November 2023

Wednesday, 26 July 2023

Wednesday, 19 July 2023

Wednesday, 14 June 2023

Tuesday, 9 May 2023

Wednesday, 9 November 2022

Friday, 7 October 2022

Tuesday, 4 October 2022

Friday, 16 September 2022

Wednesday, 20 July 2022

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Monday, 6 December 2021

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