Harem Scarem - Change the World (2020)

Country: Canada
Style: Melodic/Hard Rock
Rating: 9/10
Release Date: 6 Mar 2020
Sites: Facebook | Instagram | Official Website | Twitter | Wikipedia

I vaguely remember Harem Scarem from the hallowed pages of Kerrang! back in the day but, even though they had formed as early as 1987, they didn't put an album out until 1991, when grunge was ascendant and polished melodic rock was firmly relegated to the niches and, in the case of Harem Scarem, to the soundtrack of Degrassi Junior High. If this sixteenth studio album (if we're including a few released under the name of Rubber in some markets) is a good introduction to the band, then I've seriously been missing out.

They're a melodic rock band at heart but with hard rock edges and they sound very smooth and very catchy. There are more hooks here than in your average bait shop but there's a thump behind the vocals and guitars that prevents it all from getting soft. What's most important is that, unlike a whole slew of the melodic rock albums I listened to back in the eighties that had a couple of radio-friendly songs and a bunch of filler, there isn't a song here that could be described as average, let alone poor or bad.

Change the World has a jaunty guitar to open up, hinting at an Irish jig. It calms down to a peach of a singalong chorus. You and I are apparently going to change the world and I'm suddenly believing it. I believed it even more a couple of songs later because Aftershock and Searching for Meaning are sheer class in under four minutes each. As I couldn't figure out which one I liked most, I'll just highly recommend both of them.

The two key players here are Harry Hess and Pete Lesperance, who co-founded the band and have only left it for four years or so when the various members decided to indulge in solo and other projects. Hess provides the vocals and keyboards, while Lesperance handles all the guitarwork. Both are stellar on this album, which may have a little more focus on the vocals but only just, because whenever Hess steps back from the mike, Lesperance is there to pick up the slack with his guitar.

I'm not sure who else is involved, because the band's website doesn't appear to want to share anything newer than 2009 about the line-up. Let's just say that Stan Miczek may be playing bass and it may be Creighton Doane on drums, but that's unconfirmed. Maybe the rest of the band are session musicians, as may be appropriate given that both instruments are both utterly reliable and utterly unwilling to take the spotlight here.

The eleven tracks on offer are incredibly consistent, so you can pick any of them on YouTube as a sampler. If you dig it, you should probably just go out and buy this right now. If you don't, then this isn't for you and you're not going to get convinced by anything else on the album.

There are some slight variations. The Death of Me and Fire & Gasoline are heavier when they want to be. Mother of Invention begins softer and a little more prog. No Man's Land starts out a bit more alternative and edgy. In the Unknown features a slightly more hoarse vocal for effect. No Me without You is more overtly emotional. Riot in My Head showcases a Thin Lizzy influence that gets clearer every time I hear it.

Generally, though, this is a pretty consistent set of hook-laden songs that, in a different era, would have been all over the airwaves. This is an album with eleven worthy singles out of eleven. I wonder how many more got left on the virtual cutting room floor to keep this just under three quarters of an hour. Now I have some backtracking to do because, if I've heard anything by Harem Scarem before, it was album number one and this is number sixteen.

Smoulder - Dream Quest Ends (2020)

Country: Canada
Style: Epic Doom Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 13 Mar 2020
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | Metal Archives | YouTube

Having thoroughly enjoyed Smoulder's debut album, Times of Obscene Evil and Wild Daring, I've been eagerly awaiting their new EP, which is finally with us. While they're calling it an EP, it's a mere 21 seconds shorter than the full length album, so it's serious value for money. However, only half of it is new, the second half being their three track demo from early 2019, two of which tracks ended up on the album.

Before those are three new songs: the title track, Warrior Witch of Hel and a lusty cover of Manilla Road's Cage of Mirrors, which originally appeared on that band's Metal album back in 1982. This release is dedicated to Mark 'The Shark' Shelton, vocalist and guitarist with Manilla Road, who died in 2018. As usual for Smoulder, their original songs are sourced from fantasy literature, Dream Quest Ends presumably from Lovecraft and Warrior Witch of Hel from the Bloodsong novels that C. Dean Andersson wrote as Asa Drake.

Listening to the three new songs and the three demos offers very little in difference in sound, whether in song construction or production. That makes this flow much more than I thought it would, which is a major positive. The production is by Arthur Rizk and it's spot on. The guitars crunch, the drums pound, the bass prowls and the voice of Sarah Kitteringham constantly fights for supremacy.

And those new songs aren't just pretty damn good, they build as the EP runs. I like Dream Quest Ends, but I like Warrior Witch of Hel more and the cover of Cage of Mirrors reminds me just how great Manilla Road used to be and how I really ought to listen to their early albums more. These songs are so big that I feel like I'm experiencing them from the inside, power chords echoing around me.

While there isn't a song here under five minutes, the only epic on offer in running time is the cover at almost nine. The rest just feel epic because of the way they're built and the way they sound. Dream Quest Ends is elevated by some duetting between Kitteringham and whoever's stepping up to provide the clean male voice. Warrior Witch of Hel thrives on epochal riffing and a chorus that's just as heavy. Like the full album last year, this is far too alive to be regular doom. Epic doom works as a description but it's so alive that simply heavy metal would work too, with heavy underlined in blood.

I went back to the Manilla Road original of Cage of Mirrors to seek context and a few points made themselves immediately obvious. Manilla Road clearly spent a heck of a lot of time listening to Rush from the mid-seventies. The technology in studios in 1982 totally sucked compared to what bands can use today. And the Smoulder take on this song is pretty close to the original, the less theatrical but just as heartfelt approach to the vocals being the most obvious difference. It feels more complete too, the original being five parts that add up to a piece of music but this version a song in five parts that flow together better.

I'll skip over Sword Woman and Voyage of the Sunchaser, as they appear in a slightly more developed form on last year's album. The one that didn't make it onto that is The Queen is Gone, perhaps because the opening riff is a slow doom version of the Inspector Gadget theme tune. It's another chugger of a song and I have a feeling that, if the band re-recorded it now, it would be a little faster and a little more overt. It's still a good song though and wouldn't have been out of place on the band's excellent album last year.

Now, when will this coronavirus pandemic be done so Canadian bands can tour down here again? I'd pay good money to see Smoulder live with Shadow Weaver.

Elixir - Voyage of the Eagle (2020)

Country: UK
Style: Heavy Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 6 Mar 2020
Sites: Facebook | Metal Archives | Official Website | YouTube

Elixir are one more band back for another bite at the cherry, though it's a third shot for them. I remember them well from the mid-eighties, when they recorded a solid session for The Friday Rock Show and released an excellent debut album in The Son of Odin, which I have on vinyl around here somewhere. However, I'm not sure that I noticed that they issued a second album before calling it a day in 1990. I certainly didn't notice the reformation in 2001 that saw four more albums before they quit again in 2012. They're back once more, reforming last year with only bassist Kevin Dobbs not on board. He's replaced by Luke Fabian.

To my ears, they haven't updated their sound much in the last three or four decades, but the nostalgia in me says that's not entirely a bad thing. The bad thing is that Voyage of the Eagle requires some patience and I can see a lot of people listening to this once and drifting away because they couldn't find anything to hook them. That's an unfortunate property for an album to have, especially one like this that does grow if we have a little patience.

The opening couple of tracks are solid growers, because they're nowhere near as catchy as they want to be but they're thoroughly enjoyable nonetheless. A brief interlude named Horizons later and we're into the first song to remind us of the glory days. It's The Siren's Song and it's a patient piece with an excellent build, so slow and heavy and sure of itself that it's almost doom metal, a tone not altered by the presence of Katie Alys Barton as the Siren.

I'm presuming that this is a concept album, given that almost everything is nautical themed, including the title, and there's a recurrent sound effect, the creaking of the masts on a sailing vessel mid-voyage, that keeps showing up at the beginning and end of songs. Any thoughts that Elixir are going all Alestorm are scotched during the chorus of the opener, Drink to the Devil, a nod otherwise to pirate metal. After that, though, there's no comparison.

What Elixir do best here is that slower, steadier hard and heavy sound built from solid riffs and clean epic vocals. That means The Siren's Song and Sail On mostly, both of them strong numbers to build an album around. Perhaps the worst aspect is that they don't build as much as they should because there's no spark here to make it all memorable and it really needs one. I've stayed with it and been rewarded for that because it gets better each time I listen through, something that didn't happen with other frustrating albums like the Angel Witch from last year, but I still wanted more than I got.

What I really wanted was some urgency and hunger. Just because Elixir isn't a young band any more doesn't mean that they shouldn't sound like one. They reformed after seven years away for a reason and I wanted to hear it in the songs here but I couldn't find it. I found some decent songwriting, some agreeable old school riffs (the one in Mutiny is starting to get stuck in my head) and some impressive vocals (especially late in the album, on Whisper on the Breeze and Evermore), but I didn't find what's driving the band to return to the studio in 2020.

I should add that they do up the tempo and energy on occasion, such as with Onward Through the Storm. I wish they had done that a lot more often and, on the occasions when they did, that they did it with more emphasis. I have the feeling that this material is going to sound good on stage but this studio release is going to need people to give it time to shine for them. This was a skimpy 6/10 on a first listen for me. After a few more, I'm upping to 7/10 but there ought to be an 8/10 album in these guys and sadly this isn't it.

Ghost Toast - Shape without Form (2020)

Country: Hungary
Style: Progressive Rock
Rating: 8/10
Release Date: 3 Mar 2020
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Official Website | Twitter | YouTube

Now, here's an interesting album! Ghost Toast, a name of which I thoroughly approve, play instrumental prog rock out of Debrecen in Hungary and they're on their fourth album here. With no vocalist, that role occasionally filled by samples from movies, the line-up is guitar, bass and drums with a fourth musician on keyboards and cello. You could call it art rock, post-rock and experimental rock without being wrong and sometimes switch the rock out for metal because they have some serious power behind them.

Certainly, the opener powers up a minute and a half in from a soft piano to driving guitar. That a keyboard swell floats over the top of it for a while doesn't dissipate the way that guitar gallops and stabs. However, the return of the piano adds a melancholy contrast that keeps the guitar from becoming too vicious. It's called Frankenstein's and it's not as iconic as the Edgar Winter instrumental of almost the same name but it's still a solid opener.

The band's experimental edge is obvious in the way that László Papp sets up Eclipse with unusual drumming. It gets more interesting a minute and a half in when those drums play with the bass in what almost sounds like electronic music but isn't, except for a helping hand from the keyboardist. I feel that the riffs in the heavier sections, as solid as they are, almost function as interludes between more the experimental sections rather than the other way around.

Y13 is where the samples kick in, this time from Assignment: Outer Space, a 1960 sci-fi flick by the ever-prolific Antonio Margheriti, and the music is suitably cinematic. It's been a long while since I've seen the movie so I'm unaware of whether the band play with any of the themes from the soundtrack but they do acknowledge that movie scores are an influence for them. That's no surprise because, like all the best post-rock, they conjure up visuals.

Beyond movie scores and "heavy, trippy music", they're clearly well read in the diversity of music because Hunt of Life is a cover of an Icelandic folk song, even though it's drenched in electronica and even finds a reggae-like groove at one point. There are vocals here, but they're a sample too, from an a capella version of the song on YouTube by Kelly Jenny. While that makes it sound like they just added music behind her, there's really a heck of a lot more going on here than that, to the degree that she's hardly in it and it's mostly an instrumental.

The other song with samples is the epic closer, W.A.N.T., which stands for We Are Not Them. The piece opens with Big Brother from 1984 introducing us to hope through the "land of peace and of plenty in Oceania", but it isn't alone: it's spliced with Kurtz in Apocalypse Now reciting parts of Eliot's The Hollow Men, the poem that also gives the album its title. I thoroughly appreciate the imagination that went into combining two samples this way as it's not common. However, the imagination that went into a composition this advanced is even more appreciated.

Before W.A.N.T. are a couple of tracks that don't do anything special and so could be easily skipped over by someone only looking for special things, but they're excellent tracks on their own, even without samples or other source material to boost their presence. In fact, they're a couple of my favourite pieces here. Follow kicks off as delicately as anything on this album but it heavies up as it goes and the contrasts are neat. Compositions with dynamics always interest me and this one's done right. Before Anything Happens may be even better, with some catchy lines and more neat contrasts.

Ghost Toast have apparently been doing this for a while. Formed as a trio in 2008 with János Pusker joining a year later on keyboards and cello, they say they didn't have much musically in common but exploring the focal points is how they've come up with such interesting music. The line-up hasn't changed since and this is their fourth album. I'd very much like to go back to discover those other three.

Ross the Boss - Born of Fire (2020)

Country: USA
Style: Heavy/Power Metal
Rating: 6/10
Release Date: 6 Mar 2020
Sites: Facebook | Instagram | Metal Archives | Official Website | Twitter | Wikipedia | YouTube

Here's something new to me. I've heard quite a lot of Ross the Boss over the years, not just with Manowar (Hail to England is one of my top ten albums of all time) but also with Shakin' Street and the Dictators. However, he's made four solo albums now, oddly backed by a Manowar tribute band formerly called Men of War, who hail from Germany, and I haven't heard any of them until now but I'm glad to catch up.

This one at least is heavy metal as sonic assault and it took me a couple of listens to really grasp what they're doing. It's easy to go passive in such an onslaught and let it wash over you. I could imagine leaving a venue after a Ross the Boss set and thinking, "That was intense! Now, what did the band sound like? I can't quite remember. They were intense..."

The key to the sound is energy and the production is able to assist that. I caught a little Manowar in there, as we might expect, but surprisingly very little, because this material is faster, heavier and much more up front and in your face, with strong elements of power metal and thrash metal to scare away any thought that the band might be wearing loincloths while they play. Glory to the Slain may be a title worthy of Manowar but the song itself has far more valid comparisons to Overkill.

It's also over in under three minutes, because this band don't hang about: a dozen tracks add up to three quarters of an hour, with only of them reaching the five minute mark. They get up to play and blitz through song after song before wandering off for a beer. There's no time for cymbal solos here, even opening narrations. It's all about power and energy and no nonsense getting the job done.

The influences are really all over the map, which makes the band interesting to figure out once we get to the point where we can listen to the songs, not just let them punch us in the face over and over. Fight the Fight is kind of like Motörhead covered by a European power metal band who boast an ambitious vocalist. There's folk metal to kick off Maiden of Shadows but it moves into Crimson Glory territory too. I am the Sword is machine gun Judas Priest with maybe some Helloween layered over the top. The title track is probably the truest European power metal, with a major hook of a chorus.

I'd throw out Judas Priest as the most obvious influence, the basis for all that European power metal. However, while the vocals of Marc Lopes do aim at Rob Halford on occasion, he doesn't just stay there. He's so quintessential a metal singer that he doesn't ever really sing much, but he never growls or shrieks like he's dipping into the extremes either. This is older school: he snarls and chants, he screams and preaches, he conjures and commands. It's a good performance but some people may see it as a bit much and I think I'm among them. He even layers on occasion, I believe, because it doesn't sound like backing vocalists joining in.

Of course, as prominent as Lopes is here, the band is named Ross the Boss as an acknowledgement of its leader, Ross Friedman, who has gone by the moniker Ross the Boss forever. He was there in New York City in 1973 co-founding the Dictators when I was figuring out how to walk. He's not new but he's just as full of energy as he ever was. The guitars here reminded me of Painkiller, a clean buzzsaw sound that really resonates. The key difference, of course, is that Priest have two guitarists and Ross the Boss is the only one here.

I liked this but not as much as I wanted to. Even after a few times through, it sounds good but doesn't stay in my brain. The catchiest number is surely the title track but that's ironically probably my least favourite song here. It's the riffs that are likely to stay with me most and there are plenty of them on offer, especially in the incessant but interesting songs that I like most, titles like Glory to the Slain, Maiden of Shadows and I am the Sword. I think I need to come back to this in a month's time to see how it stands up then.

Electric Feat - Electric Feat (2020)

Country: Greece
Style: Hard/Psychedelic Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 24 Feb 2020
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram

I enjoy a wide range of different styles of music and almost everything that I review is recommended to some degree, but I don't think I've come across a band in a heck of a long time who feel as alive as Electric Feat. They're a psychedelic rock band from Athens (the one in Greece) and the video for The Caveman is a Terry Gilliam-style fever dream. It took me a while to discover who does what in the band, but the members go by monster pseudonyms: say hi to Dr. Nanos, Madam Manthos, Prins Obi and The Tree.

Oh, and they're like the bastard son of the Doors and Black Sabbath, which I really dig. Somehow I hadn't realised quite how the two bands connected, but it's impossible to miss here, because they frequently transform from one to the other and back again. Song of Disobedience starts out like the Doors but shifts into Sabbath and the vocals follow suit, though whoever's singing is still somehow Jim Morrison even when he grabs Ozzy's cape and structures the lyrics his way. The Lizard King and the Prince of Darkness? Suddenly it all makes sense.

It's Alright (with You) is psychedelic garage rock, rather like the Doors if Ray Manzarek had played bass instead of keyboards; there are no keyboards in this song but the bass is up front and overt. The band call this one "Alice Cooper-ian" and they're not wrong either. It stalks and struts like it's a performance as much as a song and we know that Coop is into garage rock from his Breadcrumbs EP last year. I'm imagining the costumes.

Lizard Queen continues this, just in case the title didn't give it away. The guitars jangle and the keyboards are completely absent (as they remain until Fogdancing late on in the album). There's also a neat homage to Whole Lotta Love with a recognisable but subdued riff and a canopy of drums and bizarre vocalising, but with a Tony Iommi solo over the top.

It's Song of Disobedience where the band slow down and really emphasise the Sabbath in them. Sabbath are there in pace, riffs and in lyrical structure and it's the first time that it's been this overt except for lyrical nods in the opener. And from this point, they really start to bounce back and forth between their two key influences: sometimes one, sometimes the other, often a combination of both.

The Caveman is so much akin to the Doors that I started to sing along with Roadhouse Blues until I realised it wasn't a cover. It grows too, with some progression that could almost warrant a guest appearance from Arthur Brown. I had the same problem with Leather Jacket, a Sabbath-infused song that's so reminiscent of N.I.B. that I had to cry out "Oh yeah!" at the right moment simply because it needed to be there.

I loved this cross pollination of sounds, because these two bands aren't as far away from each other in style or in time as we might assume without the benefit of a moment's thought. If it wasn't for the excellent production, I could imagine that Electric Feat were an unknown proto-metal band from 1970 who we're only just discovering now. They blew minds supporting the Airplane at Winterland and their jams with Iron Butterfly at the Fillmore are a thing of legend, right? I'd be into that alternate history.

Blackwood Secrecy is as garage rock as the band get. Bandcamp says that this album was "recorded (almost live)" in the Diskex studio and it's easy to buy into that. It sounds like they're playing on my desk in front of an audience of one and still giving it everything. This is the debut album for Electric Feat, I believe, but I'm hoping to hear more soon. They're too alive to wait long for a follow up and, my goodness, I want to see this band on stage!

Rose Tattoo - Outlaws (2020)

Country: Australia
Style: Hard Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 6 Mar 2020
Sites: Facebook | Instagram | Official Website | Wikipedia | YouTube

I was wary about this release, because it's not a new album from the Aussie legends (we haven't seen one of those since 2007's Blood Brothers) but a re-recording of their iconic debut from 1978 with a new line-up. Lead vocalist Angry Anderson describes the goal of the project as "honoring the past and respecting the present", so I can only presume that the Tatts are treating this as a new beginning. Let's see where it can take them from here. It'll certainly take them here to the States for the first time since 1982.

If you don't know Rose Tattoo, you should. They come from the same old time bluesy hard rock school as fellow Aussies AC/DC, Cold Chisel and the Angels and their first couple of albums are as good as anything that ever came out of Oz. They never reached the same heights of fame as AC/DC, with whom they shared the producers Vanda and Young, but they've been a huge influence on bands you know. Guns n' Roses wouldn't sound remotely like they do without Rose Tattoo and more than one of its members has said that they were set on the rock 'n' roll path by the band.

So yeah, you should listen to Rose Tattoo. But, given that it isn't tough to get hold of Rock 'n' Roll Outlaw and it's one of the essential purchases in the genre, is there a real need for this re-worked version? That's the real question here and, while I was ready to dive in to find out, I was prepared for the answer to be an emphatic no. Fortunately it's a yes with caveats.

It's cleverly structured, for a start, because this isn't the same playlist, even ignoring the three "new" songs, which I should emphasise aren't new. It kicks off with One of the Boys and Tramp isn't far behind it. Both songs are similar enough to the originals to seem pointless, though the production is great. I just sang along like I had thrown on Rock 'n' Roll Outlaw.

But after each is a "new" song that keeps us on the hop. There are three on this album, all written back at the time of the first album and demoed, but none made the album. I'd only heard Snow Queen before, having been included on the original album's 1990 re-release. The other two are Sweet Love (Rock 'n' Roll) and a ballad, Rosetta, that closes out the album. The early couple are decent songs. Rosetta isn't bad either, highlighting just how much the early Tatts were influenced by the Stones, but it can't follow what's gone before. No wonder they left it off the original album.

And then we really shift things up. Rock 'n' Roll Outlaw is a sleazier song than it used to be. It's the first track here to sound completely different from the original. Then it's the old story song, The Butcher and Fast Eddy, which starts out shaky and fails in comparison for a while, before finding a new life through rewritten lyrics. It isn't the original but it is able to find its own identity and that's crucial when covering such an iconic song.

It's worth mentioning that, even knowing these songs so well, I didn't sing along (much) because I wanted to listen to these new takes. And much of the reason they work is because the band is of serious quality and very willing to grow the songs. On bass is Mark Evans, of early AC/DC fame; he played on the Let There Be Rock album, among others. Bob Spencer on guitar has played with the Skyhooks and the Angels. Drummer Jackie Barnes is the son of Jimmy Barnes of Cold Chisel fame. I don't know what Dai Pritchard has done but I do like his slide guitar.

By this point in the album. I wanted to see how this line-up would take on a couple of the hardest hitting hard rock songs of the era, such as Remedy and Astra Wally, songs that simply cannot be too loud. I turned this up until my eyeballs rattled; my ears haven't recovered yet. And the new Tatts do well, but both pale in comparison to their originals. Remedy, in particular, has a mix that places each guitar in a different speaker and jumps back and forth, leaving one always too quiet. It's like they need another guitarist in there to bolster up the wall of sound. The mix benefits the slower, bluesier songs that play up the slide, like Stuck on You.

A couple of the more iconic songs are left towards the end, namely original single Bad Boy for Love and the most famous song on the record now, courtesy of some high profile covers, Nice Boys. The former is slower and stalks more than the original. The latter turns into reminiscence of old rock 'n' roll standards: Heartbreak Hotel, Lucille, Tutti Frutti, Blue Suede Shoes. It's a great way to reinvent a song that's a classic all on its own. Both songs are twice as long as the versions we know. The 1978 album ran 36:33 for only ten tracks. Omitting the three new songs to match it, this runs a dozen minutes longer. Add those three back in and it lasts over an hour.

All told, this isn't the original, even with over forty years of advances in studio recording technology to benefit it. But it's a good album nonetheless and it's made by a good band. Frankly, it's better than I expected it to be. Anderson's voice may not be quite as huge as it used to be but it's still a heck of a lot bigger than he is and he has evolved these songs over a forty plus year span so that some of his delivery is actually better here.

His new backing band is solid as a rock too. They're more than able to take on and reinvent an iconic album. Sure, this isn't the Tatts of 1978 but then AC/DC aren't the band they were in 1978 either. Without a time machine that can take us back to the days to when Bon Scott, Malcolm Young, Peter Wells, Mick Cocks and others were still strutting the boards, I'm not complaining about this bunch. They still kick so much ass that most of the other bands out there ought to be scared to follow them.

And, if I was in Australia right now, where they're touring in support of Live, Bush and Stone Temple Pilots, I'd be there for Electric Mary and the Tatts and then I'd hit the pub to recover.

The Grief - Ascent (2020)

Country: Ireland
Style: Gothic Doom Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 28 Feb 2020
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | Metal Archives | YouTube

Given that this is a ache-infused combo of the legendary Peaceville three of Paradise Lost, My Dying Bride and Anathema, I was always going to like this, but it took me a couple of listens through to really get on the right side of it. It tones down the death side of those doom/death bands in favour of a stronger doom side with gothic flavouring. The death aspect is most obvious in some of the backing vocals, especially on In Defiance, as singer Stephen Quinn stays clean throughout.

There are only four tracks here because this is an EP, but a second EP will follow in the summer. Also, those four tracks amount to twenty-five minutes of music so the EP is almost as long as Reign in Blood. The band were a four piece in the studio, with guitarist John Murphy doubling up on drums, but a permanent drummer has been hired so they'll be a quintet ongoing.

This isn't the most immediate material, but it's good stuff. The tone is in evidence from moment one but, for all that there's melody everywhere, these aren't catchy songs. We can flow with them and soar and swoop along with the voice of Quinn and the guitars of Murphy and Quinn's brother Paul, but this wasn't ever intended to be earworm material and all that melody is there to aid the construction of the songs rather than to hurl hooks at us.

A New Dawn knows precisely how to kick things off and, now that I've become friends with these songs, I can appreciate how quintessential the first two minutes of this song are. That's a jagged guitar tone from the outset but a nice interplay between the two guitarists and a good melody. The drums join in simply but very effectively twenty seconds in and immediately set a slow and aching pace. The vocals are right behind the drums and they're dripping with melancholy. By the time we hit a minute and a half, Quinn hurls out a pleading "Remember me", it's time for a quick breakdown with distant bells and we're off and running.

In Defiance is slower but less dense musically, to give Quinn's voice more focus. It highlights that, of those three pioneering bands, it's surely My Dying Bride who were the most influential on these Irish lads. Its minimal sections are delightful but it ramps back up just as well four minutes into the song.

Call of the Void kicks off with Kieran O'Leary's rich bass, before the rest of the band crash in to join the wake. I'd say party, but this isn't at all happy and there's a sense of loss that underpins everything. Then again, the Irish really know how to hold a wake and this isn't that cheerful either. It grows well and I particularly like the churning section a minute or two from the end.

That leaves Departed, at five minutes the shortest song on the album and the least convincing to my mind. With such a My Dying Bride influence, it should hardly come as a surprise that the Grief want to dabble in prog or alt rock at some point and they certainly do here. Even as it heavies up, I heard as much Steve Hogarth-era Marillion here as I did any of those doom/death bands and that's no bad thing. It shows that the Grief are painting with a broader palette than just Peaceville circa 1993 and that bodes well for that second EP I'll be waiting eagerly for. It's just that this song didn't resonate as much as the early ones for me.

This is the Grief's first release, but there's a history behind them that's longer than the name. The band seem to have grown out of Corr Mhóna, a doom band who sang in Gaelic and featured both the Quinn brothers and the band's original drummer, Robert Farrow. In fact, I shouldn't use the past tense as they're still a going concern, even though their album was released back in 2014. Both guitarists also play in a Katatonia tribute band named Katatonik.

As I've mentioned before, I grew up with those early Peaceville bands and I applaud anyone taking them as a starting point for their own musical journey into the future. I'd like to see where it takes the Grief.