The Darkness - Easter is Cancelled (2019)

Country: UK
Style: Hard Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 4 Oct 2019
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I surprised myself shortly into this by realising that I've heard a lot less music by the Darkness than I thought, maybe just a few odd songs. After all, this is their sixth album; they aren't new. Maybe it's because they split up after only two albums and stayed gone for a while. I certainly haven't heard anything from their second go around until now. And I should. It isn't every band who can support Metallica and Lady Gaga on tour. Separately.

The band's current line up is the original line up, but with one difference: their original drummer, Ed Graham, who was on board for the reunion in 2011, left a few years later. Currently, his seat is occupied by Rufus Taylor, who is a strong enough drummer on his own merits that it feels unfair to mention that he also happens to be the son of Roger Taylor. However, the spectre of Queen, with whose current incarnation Rufus has also played for years, just can't be ignored.

Just listen to the opening track, Rock and Roll Deserves to Die, which is an an ambitious track that features a dynamic, genre-hopping range on the scale of classic Queen tracks like Bohemian Rhapsody and Innuendo. Frankly, it's hard to compare it to anyone else. The only real difference arrives with the surprise that it's over in five and a half minutes. Isn't there a rule that an epic song like this has to last for at least eight?

Even if you drop such a clear homage to Queen in the seventies, that trawls in so much of what they did during that decade, their influence is all over this album like a rash. Check out Deck Chair, an outrageously overblown and over-orchestrated ditty to, well, a deck chair. Nobody else except Queen has been able to get away with this sort of lunacy until now and the Darkness do it very well indeed. The lyrics to Heavy Metal Lover are way out there too.

What keeps them somewhat apart from Queen are the vocals of Justin Hawkins. While these songs are clearly constructed the way that Queen would, they're easily distinguished. Slap on the title track and you could be forgiven for hearing Tie Your Mother Down but, when Hawkins lets his voice loose, we're a mile away. Sure, he has a thoroughly impressive range, right up to a strong falsetto, and we learned on the opener that he knows exactly how to scream to great effect, but he doesn't sound at all like Freddie Mercury.

Beyond feeling like a band who write Queen songs that Queen never recorded, what I took away from Easter is Cancelled is that the band are enjoying the heck out of life at the moment. I don't think songs like Heavy Metal Lover or Choke on It could be created by any band who aren't having a blast. Does anyone really make love to Cannibal Corpse? Suggesting Obituary as a power ballad band is priceless. I'm impressed by how they snuck the word "luthier" into We are the Guitar Men. That may be a first, even though few bands could exist without them.

I liked this a lot, not just as an album of songs but as a mood improver. I can enjoy just how overblown the band get on Deck Chair or how evil they get on Heavy Metal Lover, even how insanely prog they get at the end of We are the Guitar Men, but all of these songs leave me smiling every time and that is a neat trick if you can master it. The Darkness apparently have.

Neil Young and Crazy Horse - Colorado (2019)

Country: USA
Style: Rock
Rating: 6/10
Release Date: 25 Oct 2019
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Neil Young is a pivotal figure in rock music, having been a prolific part of it since forming his first band in junior high school in the early sixties. He's changed with the times but he always remains recognisable. The question I tend to ask when a new Neil Young album drops is whether it's relevant or not, because he has a strange habit of drifting out and back into relevance, notably becoming the godfather of grunge. Usually he's relevant or he isn't. This time he's kinda sorta, because this is a real mixed bag of an album.

There's little coherence across the album, these songs doing very different things in very different ways. For instance, it opens up with Think of Me, a pleasant enough three minutes spent with a lot of harmonica and an agreeably stripped down sound (this is the first Neil Young album with Crazy Horse for seven years). But then She Showed Me Love is a four minute song jammed for almost fourteen like this is a rehearsal of a garage band.

The goal, I think, is to hypnotise us into realising how we old white folks screwed up the Earth but the kids just may be able to fix it for us. I'm all for the message but the delivery is strange. Neil, in his traditional way of personifying abstract concepts, tells us that he saw Mother Nature and that "She showed me love". That's fine. The problem is that he repeats that over and over and over and over for a majority of the running time. I did find the often distorted guitar interplay interesting but not that interesting.

From those two utterly different tracks, we're given a real mixture of good, bad and indifferent in no readily apparent order. I wonder how long he spent on the track listing because there's no flow at all.

Let's look at the indifferent first. Olden Days is fair but the lyrics are a litany of expected rhymes that lessen the impact. Milky Way feels agreeably mellow, with the loose garage style guitar never threatening the mood. When we reach the end of the album, the last couple of songs seem fine while they play but they vanish into to the ether like magic tricks after we start the album again.

The bad seems to circulate around the environmental theme raised initially in She Showed Me Love. Eternity follows with a different approach, like it's an old hippie song. Even without context from Young's substantial career and even more substantial impact on rock music, the environmental material here sounds like an old hippie railing politely at the times. With Eternity, it's as if he's forgotten to even do that. Hey, listen to the train!

And that leaves the good, most obvious in Help Me Lose My Mind, where we can buy absolutely into that railing. It's an angry song, so much so that Young is too affected by his words that he hardly sings; he speaks and shouts and emotes. This is exactly the mood that Crazy Horse backs up so well. Young's often dissonant guitar finds real impact when he's hurling out his lyrics or just entreating us, "Won't someone help me lose my mind".

Based on the raw impact of that song, I'd have liked a lot more anger here. You're not wrong, Neil. We old white guys screwed up a heck of a lot but, it wasn't you and me, so maybe we should be angry about it on more than just a couple of songs. Help Me Lose My Mind is the one that really works. Shut It Down kinda works too. But nothing else here has any comparable anger level.

For example, the song in between them, Green is Blue, is the exact opposite of angry. It feels mellow, with some really nice tones in play. The lyrics continue the anger about environmental issues but, as if it was written and recorded while incredibly high, that anger is diffused into calm melancholy and elegaic acceptance. "There's so much we didn't do." It took me a while to get into it because it's so unlike its bookends, but it does its job.

And so this is a mixed bag. For three songs in the middle of the album, it's great stuff. Elsewhere there are just moments. What this album does most for me is tell me that, given the state of our times, Neil Young needs to record more with Crazy Horse. Channel that anger and scream at a lot more than just the environment. We old white guys screwed up a lot more than that.

Weapon UK - Ghosts of War (2019)

Country: UK
Style: Heavy Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 27 Sep 2019
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I've been highlighting bands that crawled out of the woodwork in 2019 and I don't think Weapon UK quite count because they kind of started that trend a few years ago. They were formed as far back as 1980, under the name of Fast Relief, quickly became Weapon and then split up in 1982 after one single and one demo. They got back together in 1984 and promptly split up again. And so we fast forward to the 21st century. They tried and failed again in 2005 but got themselves properly organised at last in 2009, finally releasing a debut album in 2014, 34 years after it all began. They were the Rosy Vista of 2014 and this is their follow-up album.

Now, I haven't heard Rising from the Ashes, but I like this a lot. As befits their origins in the NWOBHM scene in England in 1980, this is very much old school NWOBHM stuff, full of hard rock riffs, vocal hooks and a little punk attitude, though it's fair to say that the latter is easily most obvious on the band's rework of Set the Stage Alight, the flipside of that 1980 single so not one of the many new songs here.

I was enjoying the nostalgic feel for half of the titular opening track and then they added a whole other level. Clare Cunningham, the Irish lead singer of Swedish rockers Thundermother, shows up for a fantastic folky section in the middle of the song (it returns for the reprise at the end of the album). As it all heats back up, she heats back up with it to finish it all out with a roar. This isn't just a good Weapon UK album, it should be an intro to her band too, because they deserve the attention.

Ghosts of War is a really good song that's stayed with me, but Queen of the Ride is the best one on offer. It's quintessential NWOBHM, combining melody and power with a seventies Gillan hard rock vocal over a faster and heavier backing ready for the new decade of the eighties. The whole point of what I do here at Apocalypse Later is to highlight all the great music coming out a decade or four after Weapon UK were formed but I can't help but wonder here what they could have done during that intervening span had they been able to stay together.

This album is utterly rooted in the NWOBHM era and, if you doubt that, just check out '79 Revisited, with nostalgic lyrics that cleverly riff on the old "Saturday night and I just got paid" line from Rip It Up. Massive respect to the band for ending with the Friday Rock Show ident which defined the era as much as the opening to Am I Evil.

However, winding the musical clock back forty years doesn't mean that every song here is the same. NWOBHM was a movement but Diamond Head weren't Saxon, who weren't Iron Maiden, who weren't Angel Witch, and so on. Weapon UK find a lot of different sounds on this album without losing authenticity. Sea of Hope adds eastern flavour at a reduced tempo; it's slower but heavier than anything else here. All I Need has a stalking bluesy vibe. Tourniquet has a real growth to it. Queen of the Ride just gallops along. Emerald God starts out like a Status Quo song before adding power.

This isn't a new Lightning to the Nations or Killers for 2019 but it's good stuff throughout and great stuff on occasion. It's certainly a better album that Angel Witch or Steve Grimmett's Grim Reaper have managed lately and I'm looking forward to a third album.

Monolord - No Comfort (2019)

Country: Sweden
Style: Stoner Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 20 Sep 2019
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I've heard a lot about Monolord, some of it high praise and some of it jokey dismissal, but this, their fourth studio album in six years, is my first and I'm only now hearing what they do.

What they do is big fat frickin' huge riffs. Sure, they describe their sound as "enveloping, syrupy sludge" but it's hard to imagine the scale of riffage going on. Critics like me often get overly enthusiastic about our favourite bands and wax lyrical in ways that frankly overhype their effect. This band are insanely heavy with the guitar much higher in the mix than the vocalist so that things feel even heavier. Monolord state that ultra-low frequencies serve as their fourth member.

From the very outset on The Bastard Son, Thomas Jäger builds ocean waves out of his riffs that thunder onto our unwary shoreline with his voice a distant surfer hidden somewhere behind the spray. Mika Häkki's bass plays along and underlines and emphasises that heaviness to massive degrees. Is this a band or a tsunami? Esben Willems is the drummer behind this duo and he does his job well, playing as few beats as possible but enough to keep this behemoth in motion.

Beyond being agreeably shocked at just how heavy The Bastard Son got, I was a little disappointed with the song itself. Monolord were crushing me with a ridiculous amount of weight in their sound but I wasn't sure where they were going with it. They nail the melodic aspect of this sort of doom later but I didn't hear it for a while. However, the simplicity of the riffs and, frankly their monotony, is shaken halfway through when the band start to mix it up. They get slow (well, slower), a lot quieter and much more intricate, without losing that weight.

Suddenly I was on board and I repeated that experience with The Last Leaf, a song that disappointed me until it got really interesting. It took a while, even on a shorter five minute song. I should point out that this album runs a smidgeon over three quarters of an hour, but that only means six tracks. The shortest is a heartbeat away from five minutes while two songs run over nine minutes and one almost eleven.

What really sold me on the band was Larvae, the third track. Like everything here, it's Black Sabbath influenced but this time it really acknowledges the sheer breadth of what they did back in the early days. It's Ozzy-era Sabbath at its folkiest but with the riffs still fuzzed up to eleven, if not twelve. It's never just sheer bludgeoning, it runs the gamut of dynamics in a real song structure. I loved it and I enjoyed Skywards a lot for similar reasons.

By this point I'd become a confirmed fan and I stayed that way through Alone Together, a kind of heavy ballad with Jäger's vocals appearing to float into the studio from another room. And that leaves the eleven minute title track, which is a delightfully heavy romp that feels achingly unrushed. There's a point just over the halfway mark where it drops into delicate noodling only for Häkki's bass to show up with an insane power chord and crush the world for effect. I absolutely adored that contrast.

I liked this, especially once it added melody to the crushing doom, and I'm now certainly going to be checking out Monolord's prior three albums. I hear a lot of good things about 2017's Rust and that's next on my agenda.

Wednesday 13 - Necrophaze (2019)

Country: USA
Style: Horror Punk/Heavy Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 27 Sep 2019
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I've bumped into Wednesday 13 a few times at various Mad Monster Parties but hadn't realised quite what he did, beyond sing and play in a band that had a strong tie to the horror genre, the Murderdolls. Well, there are other bands too, gloriously named ones like Bourbon Crow, Maniac Spider Trash and, above all, the Frankenstein Drag Queens from Planet 13. There's also a lot of solo material, this being his eighth studio album, I believe.

Somehow I'd lumped him into the horror punk genre, which this really isn't, even if it gets mentioned a lot online. Horror doesn't equal horror punk and I didn't hear the Misfits anywhere in this material, except for maybe Bury the Hatchet, which is like Guns n' Roses covering them. Much of this album has an Alice Cooper feel to it, as if his backing band from the mid to late eighties got pushed forward through a time portal, decided that they adored the work of Rob Zombie and hired Wednesday 13 to be their new singer.

As if to back that up from the outset, the title track kicks off the album with the immediately recognisable voice of the man himself, over a simple but effective John Carpenter-esque synth line, though Alice is only here to provide narration, welcoming us to whatever the Necrophaze is. It's on the other side of the mouth of madness. Oddly, Wednesday 13 sounds a lot more like a chanting Rob Halford on this song, before moving firmly into Alice territory for the next few, including the obvious single, Bring Your Own Blood.

This is a heck of a lot of fun, just like the cheesy eighties horror movie that the cover art suggests, complete with some idiotic college kids in the dramatised bookends. The synths are high and the guitars low, just like the era would have expected. On seeing me post the cover to the new DragonForce album, Jim McLennan of Trash City fame quipped, "I'd watch that movie." I'm in no doubt that he'll say the same when I post this cover and, without any doubt, that movie would be what we get in Bring Your Own Blood. Don't forget pizza and beer. Oh, and your own blood.

Alice Cooper isn't the only influence here. Decompose and The Hearse feel a lot less theatrical in composition, even with eerie synths soaring over the latter, and fit more a heavy metal band who just like watching horror. The Hearse especially feels like something King Diamond might do, merely sans a falsetto voice. It's a deeper song than many here and it's a good one.

The Hearse also features a spoken word intro from Jeff Clayton of punk bands like ANTiSEEN and Murder Junkies. In addition to him and Alice Cooper, there are a couple of other guest appearances. Cristina Scabbia of Lacuna Coil is the voice above and behind Wednesday 13 on Monster, rather than as the guest lead, and Alexi Laiho of Children of Bodom helps out on a cover of the most notorious W.A.S.P. single, Animal (Fuck Like a Beast). I presume this is a bonus song because it appears after Necrophaze Main Theme (End-Credits). Maybe it's the radio kicking in after this album finishes at the drive-in and we head home.

Talking of W.A.S.P., Wednesday 13 does shift over a little at points from an Alice Cooper sneer to a Blackie Lawless growl. I heard that most on Tie Me a Noose. There's even some Axl Rose on Life Will Kill Us All, as if he's only Alice with a filter applied. This is like Guns n' Roses, even down to a sort of Slash lite guitar solo, and it makes me wonder how many styles Wednesday 13 plays in. I need to go back to some of those earlier albums just to see how much of a natural mimic he is. "Grotesque by request," the intro states, as if the Necrophaze is a futuristic jukebox where our dime picks the style and he delivers a new song in it.

I liked this and I'm going to need to find out what my eldest son, the Alice Cooper nut, thinks about it. I have a feeling this ought to be right up his alley. It's certainly a lot more up mine than I thought it would be. It's a great album for horror fans, with its narrations, dramatisations and samples about the Zodiac killer, but it's a pretty damn good album if you're just a metal fan and don't care about the horror genre.

Mayhem - Daemon (2019)

Country: Norway
Style: Black Metal
Rating: 8/10
Release Date: 8 Nov 2019
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For being one of the most influential bands in extreme metal, Mayhem are far from the most prolific, this being only their sixth studio album since they formed way back in 1984. Their debut, 1994's De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas, is a pivotal black metal classic and I remember them from before that. I wish I'd bought a copy of their Deathcrush EP when Tommy Vance played the title track on the Friday Rock Show back in 1987. I hate to think what that's worth now.

One of the benefits of only knocking out an album every five or six years is that it allows for easy reinvention with less likelihood of pushback from a rabid fanbase. This is Mayhem trying something different yet again, even as they combine the dynamic play of more recent releases like Esoteric Warfare with formative approaches taken back on that debut album, which they've been playing live in entirety for a few years now.

What's new here is how impressionistic this all is and I'm not just talking about the lyrics which make zero specific sense in isolation but combine to create a broader impression than any one song can provide. In this instance, we're talking about Hell, which we're presumably looking at from a different point of view, that of the daemon of the title and the gorgeous cover art by Daniele Valeriani.

The classical style of that cover art seems important to me because this is less of an album to me, a collection of songs, and more a performance piece, like an opera. I found it hard to just listen to the music, because I saw it too, unfolding on a carefully furnished stage in an ornate European theatre. It's in the music but especially in an array of otherworldly sounds that are conjured up within it and the versatile vocal performance of Attila Csihar.

I adored what Csihar did here. There are points where he provides the usual black metal shrieks, but he stalks that stage with a commanding presence, as he orders and explains, reacts and sneers, suggests and gloats. I also felt that he wasn't just playing one part, but all of them. He's the torturer and the tortured both, plus the daemon responsible for what both of them do. The effect sometimes conjures up opera singers, Orthodox liturgy or even ritual sacrifice. It's a heady mix and it's the primary reason this performance art is so effective.

While the most obvious comparisons on a Mayhem album are to previous Mayhem albums, it's worth bringing up Celtic Frost once again here. When the early Mayhem wandered around the extremes to trawl in outrageous sounds, the most obvious source for what would become Mayhem was probably Bathory, hence the classification of black metal, but they took a lot from Venom and, arguably more than ever on this album, a heck of a lot from Celtic Frost.

This dark ambient emulation of fires and stakes and pain all came from them and it's rarely been done better because it's not here just in one track of sound effects, it's here in hints and impressions buried to the exact right degree in many of the songs. Was that a guitar or a scream? Was that a drum roll or the kindling underneath another personal inferno? Was that an aside from Csihar or the response to the arrival of a fresh soul to torment?

It takes a while for any Mayhem album to fully soak into our souls, but I'm half a dozen listens into this one and I'm feeling the flames of damnation flickering at my toes. It's in the stubbornly slow bass in The Dying False King and the grandeur of the summoning drums in Invoke the Oath. It's in the ritual elements of Daemon Spawn and the tolling mantra of Everlasting Dying Flame.

This is hardly music for every rock fan, but those who have been waiting for it since Esoteric Warfare in 2014 will be in heaven now that it's here. OK, maybe not literally; what an unfortunate choice of words that was! Suffice to say that this is already my favourite Mayhem album and they set the bar pretty high when they started out.

Trust - Fils de lutte (2019)

Country: France
Style: Hard Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 27 Sep 2019
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Legendary French rockers Trust were originally formed back in 1977 and lead vocalist Bernie Bonvoisin and lead guitarist Nono Krief have remained as the core of the line-up through four incarnations of the band. Fils de Lutte, or Son of Struggle, is their twelfth studio album, and it arrives only a single year after Dans le même, suggesting that they're enjoying themselves and we may see more in the years to come.

If the name doesn't ring a bell, it's probably because you're not French, as they are huge in their home country. They're probably best known in the west for featuring not one but two Iron Maiden drummers over the years, with both Clive Burr and Nicko McBrain playing with them in the eighties; and because Anthrax have memorably covered two of their songs, including their biggest, Antisocial, bringing it to a whole new audience.

Over the years, the band with whom they've been most frequently compared are AC/DC and that's still appropriate. There's plenty of AC/DC to be found in the opening track, Portez vos croix, or Wear Your Cross, though it alternates into older school rock 'n' roll, going all the way back to that original Chuck Berry sound. It shows up in Ce n'est pas la Corée du Nord too (It's Not North Korea) and in Tendances (Trends), which has a fantastic slow riff.

Bonvoisin is sounding less and less like Bon Scott with age though. There's still a wink in his voice, most obviously on the highly cheeky Miss univers, but he's more like Bob Seger nowadays, especially on a song like Y'a pas le feu mais faut brûler, which translates to the intriguing There's No Fire But You Must Burn.

There are other influences apparent in Trust's sound, though they've been an influential band for long enough that it's easiliy fair to say that they've influenced even more other bands than they've drawn from themselves. There's lots of Thin Lizzy in C'n'est pas d'ma faute, or It's Not My Fault, and some Golden Earring in the bass-driven Les soleil brille pour tous, which I think translates to The Sun Shines on Us All.

By the way, the bass there is not the work of Izo Diop, bassist for sixteen years, because he switched over to guitar in 2016 when David Jacob rejoined the band. Between them, they've handled bass duties since 1996 and now they function as a dual guitar band.

Les soleil brille pour tous also features a fantastic use of female backing vocals, as do quite a few songs here. I don't know who the singers are who are responsible for that, but it sounds great and it adds a soulful feel to songs that are based more in the blues. They elevate On va prendre cher, a mysterious track because I cannot translate it; J'ai cessé de compter, which means I Stopped Counting; and Y'a pas le feu mais faut brûler, among others.

Trust are known for providing good value with their albums, this one being the shortest this millennium even though it features a dozen tracks in well over fifty minutes. What's notable is that there's no filler here, each of the tracks doing its job, though nothing leaps out as an obvious single. It plays out like albums used to do, showcasing different angles to the band's sound across a variety of quality songs.

The biggest complaint I can have is with the track listing. Every one of my favourite songs is on the second half of the album, as if they turned it up a notch when I flipped it over. Also, while it wraps up with a decent song, Delenda, it doesn't feel like an ending. But hey, when the track listing is the worst thing to say about an album, you know it has to be worth listening to. I look forward to lucky album number thirteen in 2020!

DragonForce - Extreme Power Metal (2019)

Country: UK
Style: Power Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 27 Sep 2019
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DragonForce are back with their eighth studio album and I have to say that I was wary going into this one. With an album title like that and outrageously cheesy cover art that makes it look like a Japanese laserdisc from the late eighties, they're obviously not fighting the fact that they're becoming an unfortunate cliché through a surprising shift into fame.

They've been around since 2001, a couple of years more if we count the early ones as DragonHeart, but they're now more famous than any of their peers. In many ways, they're struggling to remain an actual band nowadays rather than just the ultimate insane Guitar Hero level and, if that's what the world is going to care about most, then why not play into it? Yeah, I was wary.

Sure enough, it starts horribly. The opening track, Highway to Oblivion, is so close to what we're expecting that it almost feels like self parody. The twin guitar attack of Herman Li and Sam Totman is as virtuosic as we expect but are all the technical theatrics they're performing helping the song? No is the quick answer and it stays no for half of it, I think. What surprised me is that, when vocalist Mark Hudson put down his mike to give way to the inevitable guitar duel, it stopped being cheesy for me and I started to dig the song.

My next surprise was that the second track plays better, even though it has the frankly ridiculous name of Cosmic Power of the Infinite Shred Machine. I have no idea how Highway to Oblivion is cheesy but a song like this finds a way to avoid that, playing like an early Gamma Ray gem. The keyboard section could be lifted for a retro video game and the theatrical part before it has potential as a sci-fi musical movie trailer. However, there's also restraint here. They could have played this at twice the speed but they chose not to. Maybe they're not planning on being self-parody after all.

So, while DragonForce initially try to be the Steel Panther of power metal, they turn back into an actual band again and I stopped cringing and started enjoying. Yeah, it's still outrageous and overblown but there's a line there and DragonForce moved back onto the right side of it pretty quickly and they stayed there for most of the rest of the album. It still blows my mind that a song called Cosmic Power of the Infinite Shred Machine can be on the right side of that line, but hey.

If the shred machine referenced is the Li and Totman double act, then it's a consistent one this time out. I dug the guitar duels on a slew of songs like Heart Demolition, Troopers of the Stars and Razorblade Meltdown. I think the middle of those three epitomises their unique approach of playing guitars in such a way that they sound like chiptune programs. If you're into this sort of thing, they do it better than anyone and they do it a lot.

My last surprise was that that temporary restraint continues. Not everything here is done at hyperspeed and the very clean production job brings details like the acoustic koto on The Last Dragonborn to be front and centre. Sure, these lyrics are cheesy but no more so than anything that Ronnie James Dio sang on half a century's worth of classics. Hudson delivers them well.

The Last Dragonborn is really a melodic rock song that just happens to have insanely fast guitars, just as Strangers is really an arena rock song given the DragonForce treatment. If most of the songs here continue to remind of early Gamma Ray, there are other influences and they're not all power metal. Maybe that's why Extreme Power Metal ends with, of all things, a cover of Celine Dion's My Heart Will Go On. No, I'm not kidding. It's completely unnecessary and it adds nothing to the album whatsoever.

Until then, however, this is strong stuff. As if to highlight that it's not all about those duelling guitars, there's even a hyperspeed bass run from, I presume, Frédéric Leclercq before he left the band earlier this year, on the excellent Troopers of the Stars. There are nice tinkling ivories to kick off Razorblade Meltdown and bagpipes to start Remembrance Day, timely given when I'm posting.

Don't turn this off if Highway to Oblivion, the first single, is too wildly ridiculous for you. Stay with it and it really impresses in a way that's as quintessentially European as Hellyeah are quintessentially American.