Crippled Black Phoenix - Ellengæst (2020)

Country: UK
Style: Post-Rock
Rating: 8/10
Release Date: 9 Oct 2020
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | Official Website | Wikipedia | YouTube

Here's something really interesting. Crippled Black Phoenix have been around for a while but I hadn't heard of them until now. They were founded in 2004 and they've released a bunch of albums. I have no real idea how many because there's wild disagreement on that front. Discogs says this is their twelfth studio album, if we discount a collaboration with Se Delan, but Wikipedia only lists seven, calling this an EP, even though it's 54 minutes long. That's pretty damn extended to my way of thinking.

They're a rock band, but their roots are in metal: the band were founded by Justin Greaves, whom I've heard as the drummer for Electric Wizard and Teeth of Lions Rule the Divine; this album was released on Season of Mist, who built their business on extreme metal; and the opening track, House of Fools, features guest vocals from Vincent Cavanagh of Anathema. There's metal everywhere to be found here, except in the actual music.

The band call what they do "endtime ballads" to highlight both melody and the macabre. It's as good a name as any because prog rock, dark folk and psychedelic rock all describe them but don't tell close to the whole story. To my ears, they're a mix of wildly different styles and genres, which aren't always ones you'd expect together. The commonality is that this is dark material and never commercial, even though some of these songs could easily end up on TV shows. "Everything's black" ends (-), which is an interlude of a textured sample, but the line sums up the album.

My favourite song here, for example, which is Lost, is kind of like Dead Can Dance meets Coil or maybe Bauhaus with Kate Bush on vocals. It's driven by tribal drumming and clean, slightly distorted female vocals, with a periodic male shout for emphasis. How can we pigeonhole that? In the Night is like Nick Cave and Pink Floyd colliding in the American desert. Cry of Love is the Sisters of Mercy but with a U2 jangly guitar aesthetic for a while. Everything I Say could be described as Marianne Faithfull singing with Hexvessel, but it's a Vic Chesnutt alt country cover.

Whatever we call the genre, these songs are clearly masterfully constructed. They tend to start softly, with long samples, ice cream trucks or what have you, but find their grooves and build magnificently. They're generally long songs, the first three averaging just over eight minutes and The Invisible Past making it past eleven, but the album wraps with a sub-four minute cover of Bauhaus's She's in Parties. There are always layers here, meaning that we fathom the drive of each song immediately but further listens allow us to dive deeper and catch other things we might have missed first time out. Not all the textures are synths, as you'd expect for post-rock, but many are.

There are four musicians in the band. Greaves plays drums, but often also guitar and bass. Andy Taylor adds more guitars. Helen Stanley handles the keyboards, whether they're piano, organ or synths. The lead vocals mostly come from Belinda Kordic, though there are quite a few guests here too, including Jonathan Hultén of Tribulation, Ryan Patterson of Fotocrime and Gaahl of Gaahls Wyrd, along with a solo singer called Suzie Stapleton. Adding Vincent Cavanagh back in, that covers death/doom, gothic metal, electronic post-punk, black metal and indie rock. That's a heck of a mix.

I adored this album and clearly have plenty of catching up to do with the band's back catalogue. It's a dark shadow of an album, but one that that grooves and dances. It's dark but lush, negative but in the most carefully constructed of ways, non-commercial but shareable with friends from a dozen different genres. My goth and darkwave friends ought to dig this. My prog friends may well like it too and my alt-country friends and my indie friends and experimental weirdness friends. What I wonder if any of my rock and metal friends would. I don't see why not.

Bon Jovi - 2020 (2020)

Country: USA
Style: Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 2 Oct 2020
Sites: Facebook | Instagram | Official Website | Twitter | Wikipedia | YouTube

"Wake up everybody," raps Jon Bon Jovi at the start of this album appropriately for material that hit the shelves right before the US election. It's a very topical album lyrically, and the message, tellingly, is a mixed one.

Some of this is notably pessimistic in outlook, with songs about the what we're reading in the news or perhaps experiencing ourselves, subjects such as George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter movement; mass shootings in schools and authoritianism; migrants receiving inhumane treatment. "America's on fire," begins American Reckoning as a sort of anti-state of the union address. "Her conscience has been looted and her soul is under siege." There's even a COVID-19 song, as is perhaps de rigeur now.

Yet, other songs are clearly positive in outlook. "Life is limitless" is the mantra of the opening song. That COVID song tells us that, "What this world needs a hug," which is an awkward idea in this era of social distancing but I get the feeling. Old rockers often explore no end of lyrical territory but come back in the end to the oldest of all themes. "There's nothing but love," he sings on Story of Love.

Some of this is perhaps inevitable for Bon Jovi, which feels like a solo record even with Tico Torres on drums and David Bryan on keyboards. In fact, I'm rather shocked to see that there have only been two line-up changes in the band's entire history. But this is all about the words, with the music clearly the emotional underpinning. It's good music, but it's not music that would particularly work if the vocal track were to be stripped away from it. Phil X does introduce a few riffs to make his presence known, but I felt they weren't really Bon Jovi riffs, more old sounds repurposed for new songs.

That was something I couldn't avoid here. When I discovered rock music by accidentally tuning into a Friday Rock Show in 1984, my next step was to pick up a copy of Kerrang! and my first had a photo of Jon Bon Jovi on its cover. I was a little too late to hear the debut when it came out but I was there for the build to 7800° Fahrenheit's release and caught up pretty quickly. Back then, we fairly saw them as part of the hair metal scene, not as sleazy as Mötley Crüe or as heavy as Quiet Riot but similar. While I've reviewed a number of new albums by hair metal bands that still fit into that scene, this isn't one.

Perhaps we figured it out by the time New Jersey came out. Jon Bon Jovi always wanted to be a Bruce Springsteen rather than a Dave Lee Roth and hindsight only underlines that. He's all over this album, because Do What You Can and Let It Rain are clearly written in the Springsteen style. However, he's an influence here, not the only one. Beautiful Drug sounds like a Tom Petty song. Blood on the Water is a Dire Straits song until it morphs into a Springsteen social justice piece. That the next song is called Brothers in Arms is just irony; it isn't that Brother in Arms.

Lower the Flag goes even further back, as a protest song complete with a narrated rollcall of American atrocities. Jon Bon Jovi's voice moves closer to Bob Dylan's with every release and Lower the Flag has a lineage going back through Dylan to Woody Guthrie and beyond. Of course, it has Springsteen in it too, because we're never too far away from the Boss on this album. I'd suggest that the longer Richie Sambora remains out of the band (and there's no indication he'll ever return), the more the band that remains will move towards a Springsteen sound.

I'm not sure how deliberate all that is. The only deliberate song here, from a musical standpoint, may be Do What You Can, because it's not just a Springsteen song, it's also a country rock anthem. It talks about politics, getting right into all the problems manifest in this country right now. It doesn't state that it's all Trump's fault, but that name sits behind these lyrics like a giant flag. This song knows it's his watch. And yet the song unfolds in the most traditionally Republican musical language out there right now. That's neat irony.

I have to say that I haven't paid much attention to Bon Jovi of late, but I'm surprised at how long it's been for me. Like many, I probably drifted away after Keep the Faith, because the band's sound wasn't staying static, but ought to have drifted back a lot sooner, realising that sounds shouldn't stay static. I have heard snippets since, odd songs here and there, but I think my brain probably still thinks that Jon Bon Jovi is a solo artist. This doesn't do much to change that.

They've stayed active over the years, their prior album only four years old. I liked this a lot more than I expected to, but I'm not sure I liked it enough to want to work backwards to see if the last half dozen albums I might not have heard anything from are actually worth listening to. Let's just say that I'm a lot more open to the next one. There's a lot of good material here.

Bleak Revelation - Collapse (2020)

Country: Bulgaria
Style: Melodic Doom/Death Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 22 Sep 2020
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Metal Archives | YouTube

This second full length album from Sofia's Bleak Revelation is entitled Collapse to reflect the state of society across the globe. I guess that's kind of home territory for a doom/death metal band, but irony struck when I initially misread the band's name as Bleak Revolution. I live in the United States for my sins and it's feeling rather like America is about to rejoin the world but only just and maybe not very well.

There's a lot here to explore, because this is far from a single genre release and it has far from a single sound.

Drown, the shortest song on the album at under three and a half minutes, begins proceedings with an impressive elegance. This is gothic metal with a lush lead vocal, albeit with a harsh equivalent taking care of the chorus. It's clear that the band have been listening to a lot of Paradise Lost and the results are as heavy as they are poetic and, dare I say it, commercial. This is single material.

The Road to Perdition slows things down considerably, almost to funeral doom pace, and swaps those voices. We only hear the harsh voice for a couple of minutes and it feels harsher. On the opener, it felt like a death growl but perhaps that was just in context. Here, with a slower, bleaker backdrop, it feels harsher still, more of a black metal shriek. The elegance returns later, that Paradise Lost guitar sound aching through the heaviness, but it's a rougher elegance, as if the band intended it to seem a lot less polished, with feedback edges on the guitarwork. The mixing up of the tempo late in the song adds to that. I ended up with Celtic Frost vibes.

And that rougher intention goes double for The Misanthrope, an epic at almost twelve minutes. The clean vocal here is more like a roar of pain, which is echoed by the harsh voice when it joins. I'm only seeing bass player Anton Andonov credited on vocals, but it really seems like there are two singers on this album, even as their individual voices vary to meet the needs of a particular song, right down to narration on most tracks. Maybe they're both him and the layering was done in the studio, in which case he'll need a partner to mimic this live. Maybe someone else just didn't get their credit.

While the varied vocal approach struck me first, the shifting pace wasn't far behind it. That happens a lot here and the range of paces employed is notably wide. Range like that tends to come up more with singers, who have a top note they can reach and a bottom one; if the difference between them is more than a couple of octaves, it becomes notable. With bands, there are usually a couple of tempos they're comfortable with; thrash bands often shifting between fast pace and mid-pace. Here, Bleak Revelation have dozens of different tempos and they often exercise a lot of them in a single song. They certainly keep us on the hop.

While the influences stay relatively static at Paradise Lost and Celtic Frost, they mix up that combo in a lot of different ways (The Web of Your Betrayal sounds more like the former musically but the latter when the vocals take on a chanting approach), and there are other sounds here. Death of a Wanderer has a Viking metal undertone through a martial drumbeat from Georgi Bogdanov, especially early on. There's plenty of psychedelia in the guitarwork on Void, a fantastic instrumental that ventures with confidence into stoner doom territory. I'm not sure what else is in Scorned, which is gothic metal but the guitar hints at folk melodies in its quieter moments.

In short, there's a lot here. It's almost all dark, those perkier melodies behind the crunch of Scorned notwithstanding. It's wildly varied in tempo and it moves between genres with ease. And, whatever it happens to be doing at any particular moment, it remains heavy, sometimes crushingly so, because of the guitar tones and the emotional depth. There are two guitarists, Martin Bachvarov and Aleksandar Dimitrov, and I have no idea which is doing what, but they're a solid team.

I haven't heard Bleak Revelation's first album, which was Afflictive Seclusion in 2015, but the band do suggest on their Bandcamp page that it wasn't quite as dark and heavy as this. Given how particularly dark and heavy this is, that may not mean much. Clearly I should check it out though, because this is a dark cloud of an album. After all the upbeat and perky releases that I've reviewed this week, this did a solid job of reasserting grim reality.

Saltatio Mortis - Für immer frei (2020)

Country: Germany
Style: Medieval Metal
Rating: 8/10
Release Date: 9 Oct 2020
Sites: Facebook | Instagram | Official Website | Twitter | Wikipedia | YouTube

There's a song by gypsy punk masters Gogol Bordello called American Wedding whose lyrics begin "Have you ever been to American wedding? Where is vodka? Where is marinated herring? Where are the musicians that got the taste? Where's the supply that's gonna last three days? Where's the band that like fanfare? Gonna keep it going twenty four hour!"

That sprang quickly to mind here because Saltatio Mortis, those German purveyors of fine folk metal since the year 2000, have a new album out and they're exactly who I'd have booked to perform live at my wedding, should I have won the lottery to pay for their airfare. They're the musicians that got the taste and like fanfare. I'd have ventured out onto the dancefloor myself, because even my notoriously uncoordinated feet can't not move to this music. That's a good thing because the band's name means "dance of death" and, according to Wikipedia, their motto is, "He who dances does not die."

If I'm counting properly, this is their twelfth album and their incessant beats are backed up by driving bagpipes with no end of folk instruments that only start with hurdy-gurdy, bouzouki and shawm. This band have more energy than any half dozen random punk bands and they know exactly how to get our feet moving, our head banging and our voices singing along, even if we don't have enough German to buy a beer during Oktoberfest. "Was ist ein vaterland?"

I've heard a few Saltatio Mortis albums in my time and I've never been disappointed by them. They've moved forward a lot since their early days, to the degree of a rapped vocal on Mittelfinger Richtung Zukunft, but that progression is perhaps best highlighted here in Palmen aus Stahl, which starts out like it's introducing a rave and quickly leaps into NDH territory, an engaging mixture of Rammstein and your favourite Renaissance bagpipe group (hey, Tartanic). Again, I don't know the lyrics (Palmen aus Stahl apparently means Palm Trees of Steel), but I was singing along anyway in words that may or may not have approached the real ones.

Palmen aus Stahl is a highlight, but there are a bunch of those. My favourite may or may not be Loki, but Linien im Sand is right behind it and then the title track and Palmen aus Stahl and Löwenherz... maybe the whole album is a highlight. OK, a few listens in, I'm finding a few songs starting to fade a little, but there isn't one duff track on offer and there are fourteen of them here, if we count the instrumental intro, Ein Traum von Freiheit, which is as evocative as anything else here, if even more Celtic. It's almost the definitive stage intro and it leads directly into the punky Bring mich zurück.

The first eight songs in tandem are enough to leave someone of my advancing years breathless, so it's probably a good thing that the band calm things down after that. Rose im Winter is a solid ballad, all rough but heartfelt and with a neat drone behind it. Factus de materia is an old school mediaeval folk tune, sung in Latin with multiple chants and performed for the most part with hand held drums; it's a demonstration that folk music isn't just for genteel scholars because this one kicks ass and I could see the steins swaying during choruses. Seitdem du weg bist sounds like an acoustic take on pop punk and that continues as the album heats back up again.

After that three track break, Saltatio Mortis kick right back into high gear with Keiner von Millionen and they stay there until the album's done. These final three songs have pop sensibilities, as indeed a number of earlier songs did, but they're still bursting with energy and they kick serious ass. It's just a reminder that, while this band are fairly categorised as folk metal, even if Metal Archives still hasn't opened their door to them, they cast their net widely and trawl in all sorts of styles to transport into the futuristic mediaeval mindspace that they've pioneered. And that keeps them as fresh as ever. Now, about that wedding...

Djabe - The Magic Stag (2020)

Country: Hungary
Style: Progressive Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 25 Sep 2020
Sites: Facebook | Instagram | Official Website | Prog Archives | Twitter | Wikipedia | YouTube

I hadn't heard of Djabe until now, but they've built quite an international audience for a difficult to categorise Hungarian band through their collaborations with Steve Hackett, the guitarist of Genesis (and much more) fame. They've been around since 1995, but it seems that he began working with them in 2002 when their founder, Attila Égerházi, took on the distribution of Hackett's albums in Hungary. Since then, they've recorded and performed together frequently, Hackett describing them as "the best band I have ever played with." He co-wrote some of this album and plays on seven of its eleven songs, plus the bonus track on the vinyl edition.

Djabe means "freedom", not in Hungarian but in an African language family called Akan, which goes a long way to highlight how this band are rooted in world music. The first sounds you'll hear, during an instrumental intro called Beginning of Legends, are drums, flutes, piano and a Hungarian lute called a cobza. It's exotic and evocative and it sets a fantastic scene. So, they play folk music, or for those of us not in Hungary, world music.

The title track plays in that territory too, but it's clearly prog rock except when it's jazz. Djabe play an enticing prog/jazz fusion, though it's hardly aggressive. Their jazz style is smooth but never less than interesting because of the different sounds it trawls in. The Magic Stag features complex drums and a startling bass, along with a laid back vocal from drummer Péter Kaszás, who also sings on Down by the Lakeside. That one's less progressive and less jazzy, but it's still both with that smooth voice lending a real mainstream touch. Take the Alan Parsons Project and yacht rock them up.

In between those two vocal pieces, Power of Wings is even more immersed in jazz; it's an instrumental that starts with sitar and saxophone, which might seem like an odd mix, and gradually passes themes on to more traditional instruments, like Attila Égerházi's guitar. Far Away is jazzy too, reminding of a Yes instrumental, complete with prominent bass runs, but moved back towards smooth territory with a prominent trumpet. Both of these pieces move themes around the instruments, swapping solos and improvisations, then passing the torch on again. I dig the instrumental fusion much more than those songs with voice, not entirely because of the outstanding basswork of Tamá Barabás.

So, Djabe are a world/folk/prog/jazz group, who write complex songs, most but not all instrumentals, even when telling a story. They're all reasonably but not excessively long. Down by the Lakeside is one of the short songs here, at a blink over five minutes. Power of Wings sits at the short end of the range that Djabe are clearly comfortable with, just shy over seven minutes. Of the ten songs on offer, half of them fit within a minute above that baseline. Only the closer, Uncertain Time, goes further, nudging a little past nine minutes. Seven is clearly the sweet spot for improvisational music to breathe.

Thus far, Hackett has only played on the title track, which he also co-wrote with his wife Jo, but that's misleading because he plays guitar on Unseen Sense, the fifth full track, and contributes to every one of the pieces still to come. I can see why he enjoys playing with Djabe, because he fits in here without remotely standing out, as you might expect an aging British prog rocker to do when teaming up with a Hungarian jazz band. It all feels completely natural, as if his guitar is an established component in a time-honoured Djabe sound.

I don't know if the proggier pieces are because of his influence or because that's always been part of a Djabe sound that dates back a quarter of a century. There's prog in most of these pieces, even if jazz is a little more overt. Then again, this is arguably less jazzy than the current Focus album and how does that usually get categorised? Frankly, I was looking for more prog than I got, and more world too, but the jazz is often proggy, even if Áron Koós-Hutás's trumpet, which is a delightful addition to sweeter pieces like Two Little Snowflakes, always brings it back to the jazz side of things.

The most world we get is Rising Horizon, which is built on keyboards and vocals by Égerházi's father, who recorded them at a folklore festival in Transsylvania in the seventies. It's very world music, albeit backed by very western keyboard textures, for a few minutes before it reverts to the laid back jazz of the previous few pieces. The most prog we get is Uncertain Time, that nine minute closer, anchored by Hackett's acoustic guitar but with that trumpet soaring above. And, in many ways, this starts well and just keeps getting better. I'm certainly going to listen to this a lot more.

Rob Moratti - Paragon (2020)

Country: Canada
Style: Melodic Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 30 Oct 2020
Sites: Facebook | Instagram | Official Website | Twitter | YouTube

I'm learning a lot about melodic rock lately by listening to Chris Franklin's fantastic Raised on Rock radio show. It's never been my genre of choice, but I've always enjoyed it. Sometimes it's good to let a good thrash album clean you out and then shift over to a good melodic rock album to fill you back up with happiness again. This would be a really good candidate for that sort of scenario, because it's just as perky as a sorority girl on a sunny day.

Rob Moratti is one of those many melodic rock vocalists who have built quite the discography but for an array of different bands. The biggest band he sang for were Saga, though he was only with them for a three year stint in between Michael Sadler's first and second tenures. That's him singing lead on The Human Condition. Before that, he was most notable as the lead singer for Final Frontier, but he sang on albums by Acacia Avenue, Northern Light, Phenomena and others. Since Saga, he's put out a string of solo releases, of which this appears to be the fourth. Chris will likely know all of these; I just know Saga and Phenomena, but I've long enjoyed both of them.

It's difficult not to like this album, because its inherently likeable. Everything is melody, whether it's a guitar or keyboard line or Moratti's vocals, and that means that everything is perky and catchy. If it fell into a time portal and emerged in the America of 1984, this material would be all over the charts, especially a song like Where Do We Go from Here. Well, either that or we'd still be proclaiming shock that it wasn't even three and a half decades on. That song is four radio-friendly minutes of class, right down to the fluid guitar solo in the middle.

In fact, it's so perky and catchy that it could easily have become either too poppy or too slick. I'm very happy to say that it avoids the former, being far more comparable to Journey or Europe than, say, the Cutting Crew. The closest it gets to pop is the ballad Break the Chains, which still features enough of a rock guitar to avoid that fate. I see a few guitarists credited on this album, including Ian Crichton of Saga, Joel Hoekstra of Whitesnake and Torben Enevoldsen of as many different bands as Moratti, and often the same ones. Add the legendary Tony Franklin on bass and you clearly have a rock band and an excellent one at that. Drummer Stu Reid isn't as prominent but he has a portfolio too.

So if this is rock music rather than pop, is it too slick? Well, some songs had me in two minds on that front. I don't have anything against melody and I kind of like when it just takes over everything, but I do like a little grit to keep it from sounding artificial. Moratti's voice is so naturally smooth that the production really shouldn't underline that with the audio equivalent of PhotoShop smoothing it just a little more, but it seems to me like it did exactly that. This is slick and commercial and unashamed. I could imagine loving songs like Remember and All I'm Living For on American radio but finding them overplayed and sticking so firmly in my skull that I'd end up hating them.

Often, in my reviews of melodic rock albums, I struggle to find the right comparisons, because it's the genre I have least depth in, but it wasn't that hard here. I'm Falling has a Europe feel to it and Where Do We Go from Here overtly reminds of the most commercial REO Speedwagon songs. Alone Anymore kicks in like a Van Hagar single, even if Moratti's voice doesn't have any of Sammy's roughness. Many of the other songs remind of Journey, which may not be too surprising given that Moratti can hit the same high notes as Steve Perry and even has a Journey tribute album under his belt.

If there's a negative here, it's that Moratti doesn't stretch himself here. I get the impression that he could knock albums of this quality every couple of months and, as enjoyable as they would be, I'd like to hear him mix it up a bit and move just a little outside his comfort zone. That doesn't happen here. You may not care.

Afterpain - The Endless Cycle (2020)

Country: Argentina
Style: Symphonic Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 21 Aug 2020
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | Twitter | YouTube

Here's another submission for review, this time from a symphonic metal band from Buenos Aires. The band appear to be a trio, with Fernando Rey (no, not that one) on most of the instruments, including guitar, bass and drums, though there are three guests providing guitar solos and, on a pair of songs, rhythm too. Mauro Fallico adds keyboards, while Vanina Coletti handles vocal duties. They've been a band for six years now but this is their debut album.

My initial impression was that their sound was decent but nothing out of the ordinary. If I threw out "symphonic metal" at a random point in conversation, this is exactly what would immediately come to mind. The drums are patient but versatile, the guitars are elegant and classy, the keyboards are an ever-present texture and occasional lead. Coletti's vocals are perhaps the only element not precisely as we might expect, though she's really close; the difference is that it sounds like she has a rock voice that's taking on the symphonic style rather than the usual classical voice that's rocking it up a bit.

I should emphasise that all of this is done well (and further listens underline that). It merely doesn't get surprising. At this point, I was mostly impressed at how solid the musicianship was, given that it was mostly the work of one man. I hoped, as the album ran on, that it would depart a little from the standard genre template and I can happily say that it does, if not particularly often. It gets better in time not because of anything particularly innovative but because it's just performed so well and in a way that takes us deeper into the songs with each listen.

The most ambitious song is clearly Despair of the Brave. The other ten songs on offer all run between four and six minutes, but this one's a long blink shy of ten. It doesn't mix things up much but it does add a dramatic spoken section in the middle and there's a particularly nice transition right after it. It isn't the imaginative epic I hoped it might be, but it's engaging and lively and it never drags, even at this length.

It's worth mentioning that the album never drags either, even though it's a generous hour in length. I think that's more to do with the sound being consistently upbeat than any innovative songwriting, but a second listen showed that these songs are deeper than I thought initially. There's a lot of to and fro between Rey and Fallico, epitomised by the midsection of Enemy, as if to underline that there are two musicians here: one on keyboards and one on everything else.

In particular, the band really know how to grab our attention and they do that rather a lot and often in deceptively simple ways that don't stand out at the time but turn out to be really clever. I enjoyed the opener, Flying Dreams, but it didn't wow me until the keyboards, guitar and voice merge in a glorious crescendo and I grinned at how simple but highly effective that was.

The standout track for me is Rage, which has a fantastic intro and some real attitude. Everyone seems to be performing harder and with more edge and it works on every level. It's fair to say that I wanted more of this across the other songs but the band didn't want to deliver that elsewhere. Enemy does it early but then calms down to allow Coletti's voice to take the lead. This one highlights her rock voice as well as anything else here, except perhaps parts of Monster or especially the end of Lights Out, as she sustains a long note with a heck of a lot of power.

Oddly right after the angrier Rage is the exact opposite: Forgive Us is the power ballad on the album. I'm discovering that I like power ballads less and less as the years go by but this one succeeded by not annoying me and that's becoming a real compliment from me. I kinda liked this power ballad and that was my biggest surprise here. It's a really good song.

Well, there was one other surprise, beyond how much songs like Misery and Eternal Prisoner build on a second listen, and that's the closer. I liked the old timey radio bit to kick off Bye Bye Bye, which is another upbeat song that pulls back to let Coletti's voice in. The surprise is that it sounds so utterly like a pop cover that I looked it up and was shocked to find that it's an *NSYNC song. I really wasn't expecting that.

In summary, this is another grower. I've been reviewing a few of those lately, albums that I enjoyed on a first listen but enjoyed a lot more on a second. Now I need to hear someone play Rage as the second half of a double play with Memoira's Snowglobe to set it up. That would be a great radio pairing. And so, I think, would Snowglobe and Forgive Us.

Iron Angel - Emerald Eyes (2020)

Country: Germany
Style: Heavy/Thrash Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 2 Oct 2020
Sites: Facebook | Metal Archives | Wikipedia | YouTube

Iron Angel seem to be getting serious nowadays. This German heavy/power/speed/thrash metal band were a favourite of mine back in the mid-eighties, with Hellish Crossfire a fantastic debut album (and this reminds that I haven't heard Sinner or Rush of Power in decades; I need to remedy that as soon as this review is done), but they never became prolific. Formed in 1980 as Metal Gods, they managed one more studio album before splitting up in 1986. They got back together for a decade over the turn of the millennium but that period didn't prompt a new release. However, they've been back again since 2015 and this is their second new album already, after 2018's Hellbound.

The main man is Dirk Schröder, who's been the vocalist throughout the band's history. The rest of the band are recent additions, all of whom showed up after the latest reformation; the only one I run any chance of having heard elsewhere is bassist Didy Mackel, who also plays for Not Fragile. Schröder is a quintessential power/thrash singer, but then he ought to be because he helped to forge the template. His voice is clean but with rough edges, like it's been seriously lived in. Iron Angel always stayed more on the thrash side of that power/thrash balancing beam than other German pioneers like Helloween.

I liked this immediately and enjoyed it throughout but it hasn't grabbed me the way that the band's debut did. It's heavy and it's fast and it's powerful, just as it ought to be, clearly influenced by Judas Priest, especially in the merging of power and melody, but ramped further into speed metal than the Priest ever went, even on Exciter. What I found here that I don't remember is a Saxon influence. While the twin guitars of Robert Altenbach and Nino Helfrich echo the Priest in their solos, Saxon and Iron Maiden creep into the riffs and I caught an occasional Biff Byford vocal melody.

It's most apparent in the mid-paced songs, the Saxon influence most obvious on Bridges are Burning and the Maiden on What We're Living For, which could be a lost Somewhere in Time era track in a very natural heavier cover version. This latter is the Iron Angel I remember best, both commercially viable and reliably frantic, because mid-pace for Iron Angel is fast for many other bands. What We're Living For is the highlight of the album for me, though the similarly Maiden-infused title track comes close, especially with its exotic midsection. This is a band that still plays Powerslave on a regular basis.

The faster songs, like the pair that kick us off in energetic style, Sacred Slaughter and Descend, bear a far more to be expected Accept feel, again at their fastest: think Fast as a Shark instead of Princess of the Dawn. As the album runs on, the band effortlessly shift back and forth between the English heavy metal style of the early eighties and the German speed/thrash metal that grew out of it: a galloping Maiden twin guitar assault here, a Accept classical nod there. And, of course, there's always the sheer energy that's so evident in Teutonic thrash.

It's a good sound to have and I kept on enjoying this across multiple listens. While fewer songs grab in the way that I'd hoped, none of them get old quickly or, thus far, at all. I'm three listens in and each of the eleven songs on offer still sound fresh in my mind. In fact, every time Dark Sorcery ends, I find myself in a sort of vacuum, wondering why we're not just rolling on to the next song. And my reaction to that has always been to press play again because this is strong stuff.

My next step, after listening to this another time or two, is to seek out Hellbound because I see that it's been well received and, if it's anything like this, I'll happily immerse myself once more in new Iron Angel material. Suddenly, 1986 doesn't seem quite so far away and, to me, that's often a good thing.