Tower - Shock to the System

How it feels to chew 5 Gum

Were you, like me, devastated when Satan's Hallow broke up pretty much immediately after releasing one of the standout throwback speed/trad metal albums of the decade a few years ago?  Are you, like me, interested in Midnight Dice, the band that took shape afterwards featuring every member of Satan's Hallow except Von Jugel, but think they're missing some of the previous magic and are getting impatient with how long it's taking them to put out a full length?  Do you, like me, firmly believe that you can gauge a metal band's quality simply by judging how ugly the members are?  Then boy fuckin' howdy do I have a treat for y'all today.

While there's been no shortage of raunchy female-fronted throwback metal in the past few years thanks to bands like Solicitor, Crystal Viper, Sanhedrin, Savage Master, and others (not to mention more polished power metal entrants like Battle Beast having a pretty great run until recently), there's some primal intangible that Tower scratches like a spider bite.  To bring it back to Satan's Hallow one last time, Von Jugel once described the intention behind their sole album to be single-mindedly tight and focused, with nothing but ass kicking metal from front to back, not unlike a finely tuned opening set from the best local opener you've never heard of.  That idea is in the forefront of my mind when listening to Shock to the System.  This is 39 minutes of lean, mean, ball-shattering Heavy Fucking Metal straight out of the mid 80s.  I give throwback acts a lot of shit on principle because I prefer bands that bring their own flavor to the style instead of just ripping off classics and calling it a day, but if exceptions that prove the rule are a thing, then the fact that Tower was such an instant hit with me should show that they are exactly that.  This really feels like a temporally displaced Warlock album from their speedier era instead of a group of kids desperately wishing they were Warlock, ya know?

The Warlock comparison is pretty much mandatory considering the vocal stylings of Sarabeth Linden here.  Doro is pretty much the undisputed Queen of Metal at this point in history and her sandblasted howl is a huge reason why.  Linden follows in her footsteps by blasting the listener with the vocal equivalent to a flamethrower, but I'd wager she actually has more in common with the tragically forgotten Nicole Lee, who fronted Znowhite in the late 80s when they were secretly one of the best thrash bands in America.  Check out "Running Out of Time" for probably the clearest example of their similarity.  Linden has a very similar hint of shrillness (I know that's usually a negative but I mean it value-neutrally here) with her wild-out shrieking and fuckloads of vibrato when she really cuts loose that sets her apart from the flood of Doro-likes out there.  She sounds like she's flying off the rails and I love it, it's completely unhinged.  

While she's the highlight of the band for sure, Shock to the System wouldn't be worth listening to if the music underneath her vocal acrobatics weren't equally great.   Fortunately, Tower avoids the pitfall that Iron Griffin fell into and gave the vocal star some excellent songs to work with.  The majority of the album is awash in 80s sleaze and early metal tropes, but instead of being tired rehashes of 40 year old ideas, it's approached with the kind of creative verve that really only happens when the stars align.  Sure, a track like "Hired Gun" can trace its lineage directly to late 70s Motorhead if you really wanted to dissect it, but it doesn't feel like a Motorhead track, it feels like a Tower track, and that's very important for reasons I've repeated plenty by now.  One thing I really appreciate about Shock to the System is that it's unafraid to dabble in hard rock influences as well, instead of limiting themselves to the tropes that we exclusively categorize as "heavy metal" forty years later.  "Hired Gun" is a great example in the opening minutes, as are "Blood Moon" and "Lay Down the Law", the latter of which is pure arena metal cheese during the buildup.  What makes these touches magical, however, is how startlingly brief they are, as each and every one of those tracks I mentioned (along with the rest) inevitably climax with absolute teeth-shattering speed metal insanity.  This balance between hooks and intensity would be clinical if it wasn't so obviously covered in slime.  The overwhelming sense of pure fuckin' raunch is completely inescapable and I'd argue that it's crucial to the album's success.  I want my metal to sound fuckin' dangerous and that's exactly what Tower gives me.  "Blood Moon" kicks the album off with a nifty marching snare and a descending guitar riff that sounds like it could've been written by Steppenwolf, but it lasts a whole twenty seconds before Linden fires off the first absolutely deranged howl and the music abruptly shifts into high octane carnage.  It's so destructive and over-the-top that the first simile I thought of was "it's like a parade float with boosters and rocket launchers instead of t-shirt guns" and I almost didn't write that down because it's so stupid, but god dammit I seriously can not think of a better visual to describe the reckless enthusiasm on display here.

There's very little I don't adore about Shock to the System, and I can't recommend it enough for fans of older, less extreme styles of metal.  If there's any flaw, it's simply that "In Dreams" doesn't really sound like a seven minute long track, and man that's barely even a complaint!  What it lacks in ambition it makes up for in execution, and it's just a fantastic fist-pumping metal tune instead of a particularly epic one.  That's uhh... kinda it.  I haven't even touched on the smaller aspects like how much the solos melt face or how fucking great "The Black Rose" is, the whole experience is just nugget after nugget of unoriginal but extremely explosive Judas Priest style trad metal if every song was "Freewheel Burning".  And come on, does that not sound rad as shit?

RATING: 92%

Lunar Shadow - Wish to Leave

A trendy move, but a good one

 

It always takes a few years for new trends to catch on, and I think we've recently been seeing the ripples left by In Solitude's third and final album, Sister, becoming a roiling surge years later.  Shortly after their abrupt left turn from Mercyful Fate styled heavy metal to a dark, downbeat gothic rock/metal hybrid with heavy influence from goth staples like Bauhaus and Fields of the Nephilim, we saw Tribulation abandon death metal to hit a similar sound, and in the years since we've seen more and more bands adopt the style.  The biggest one is undoubtedly Idle Hands/Unto Others in my circles of the internet, but I can only foresee more burgeoning into the spotlight as it becomes more comercially/artistically safe.  

 

Of all the bands to hop on this trend, I don't think there was a better candidate than Lunar Shadow.  I'm using the term "trendhopping" in a value-neutral way here, despite knowing that it's typically a pejorative.  What Lunar Shadow did here was shift their sound to more closely emulate a style that is trending positively, that is a trendhop, pure and simple.  The reason I'm not upset with it this time is because it turns out this is exactly what Lunar Shadow needed to do to properly play to their strengths.  Unlike high profile shifts that I vocally hated, these Germans didn't abandon their strengths with the shift, and instead directly enhanced them.  Enforcer traded being the best speed metal band in the world to become an average glam metal band.  Skeletonwitch traded being one of the only consistently relevant American thrash bands that didn't form 40 years ago to become the ten trillionth mediocre atmoblack band.  Lunar Shadow, on the other hand, traded being a mediocre trad metal revival band that simply "had potential" to become something that fully unlocks said potential.  That's the key difference here.

Far from Light and The Smokeless Fires were both novel curiosities to me.  They were rollicking heavy metal in the typical Cruz del Sur vein, but there was always something a little more interesting/frustrating about them.  Both albums were great and terrible at the same time.  Great riffs but bad vocals, cool atmosphere attached to songs that didn't really suit it, production that was interesting but not exactly good, touches of black metal influence that never really got to shine or recontextualize the songs, et cetera forever.  Max always struck me as a great guitarist with great ideas but was constantly saddled with shitty vocalists and couldn't seem to get his cool ideas to manifest in a way that worked.  And that's why Wish to Leave works so well.  It turns out the problem all along was that he was simply writing in the wrong genre.  The atmosphere was always so damn strong on those first few albums so it makes total sense to shift to a genre that focuses much more on atmosphere in the first place.  The riffs were always cool and melodic but never really went anywhere, but that's not a problem here since this dreamlike wateriness allows the riffs to breathe and wander freely while clean arpeggios over the top keep things grounded.  The vocals always kinda sucked but that's fine this time since they're less a focal point and more of a background element that adds color to the atmosphere instead of distracts from pummeling riffage.  The Smokeless Fires sounded like a decent album that was unsure of itself but Wish to Leave sounds like a definitive statement by a band that finally found their calling.

The majority of the album is very laid back and cool-toned, but there are a few elements of fire near in the back end.  "And Silence Screamed" is the obvious example, starting off with double bass and a very twisty Iron Maiden style melody that used to be the band's bread and butter, but after four tracks of more relaxed psychedelia it hits pretty hard and feels like a fun diversion from the mopey sadness that the album had been wallowing in, despite lyrically following the same threads.  This is also where the album's biggest flaw shines through to a degree though, and that's that the new approach has led to a very soft guitar tone and distant, echoey drums, which works excellently on tracks like "I Will Lose You" and "To Dusk and I Love You", but is shockingly ill-suited to galloping heavy metal riffs.  It feels like an odd but intentional aesthetic choice on "And Silence Screamed", but there is a random heavy bit that pops up occasionally in "Serpents Die" and it sounds hilariously dinky there.  "The Darkness Between the Stars" should be the worst offender in this regard since it's the lone track where their sparse black metal influence unexpectedly returns, but the blasting comes from out of nowhere and thanks to the very wide open snare drum sound it winds up sounding overwhelming and dramatic instead of incoherent and confusing.  The fact that Lunar Shadow didn't go whole hog and just rip off Idle Hands completely despite that being a very obvious influence here is fantastic and helps a lot when it comes to my previous point of them enhancing their strengths.  The odd off-genre bits used to be cool but weren't effective, whereas this time they saved them all for the final song and it ultimately works beautifully and turns the song into the most monumental one on the album.

Idle Hands is an obvious comparison since they were such a surprise hit two years ago and Lunar Shadow is obviously aiming for that same crowd here.  Basically every issue I had with Mana isn't a problem on Wish to Leave.  Instead of the weak vocals being the focal point and vessel to deliver every hook, the wimpy vocals are mostly a textural element that shines occasionally but usually cedes ground to the atmosphere.  Instead of the riffs being contractual afterthoughts they're quietly creative in very evocative ways.  Instead of the lyrics being dumb sophomoric poetry that made my 15 year old self cringe, the lyrics don't even matter to me because the music is actually fuckin' interesting and paints a perfect picture without the need for words.  

tl;dr - Lunar Shadow finally got it right by completely shifting their approach to songwriting.  Of all the bands I was expecting a hit from, these guys weren't on the list at all.  Wish to Leave is by no means perfect (it tends to blur together and the songs typically don't stand apart from each other all that well, and the vocals do still suck, they're just less prominent and easier to ignore now) but I am very pleasantly surprised.  

RATING: 84%

Kryptos - Afterburner

Shredder on a hog

Trad metal had a pretty strong showing in 2019, with debuts from Idle Hands, Traveler, and Smoulder absolutely crushing, with others that I either haven't heard or didn't like much like Pulver, Riot City, and Iron Griffin generating a lot of buzz as well.  Bubbling under the surface of all these heavy hitters has been a quaint little outfit from Bangalore, Kryptos.  They've been plugging away for a long while now, existing in some form since 1998, and gaining some fame for being the first Indian band to play a full set at Wacken back in 2013, and they've been on my radar for a while thanks to my currently-shelved review series on countries overrepresented in population but underrepresented in metal.  21 years into their career, they've finally released their fifth album, Afterburner.

Yeah go ahead and place this firmly in the latter category up there.  Maybe it's because Balls to the Wall and British Steel are basically forty years old at this point, but man I really find myself struggling to get excited for strict orthodoxy in that camp nowadays.  Traveler is fast and mean, Smoulder is crushing and heavy, but Kryptos is just kinda... there.  This is really basic Judas Priest or Accept style heavy metal with raspy vocals and a few bursts of speed here and there on tracks like "Crimson Queen".  You'd think that having a vocalist that sounds so much like Mille Petrozza would up the thrash influence just by accident, but no, Afterburner is very mid paced and traditional, with riffs that would be all time classics if they weren't already perfected decades ago and rehashed by hundreds of similar bands in the meanwhile.  I hope you like the "Restless and Wild" riff, because you're about to hear it no less than six dozen times here.  At least Accept had the good sense to put "Fast as a Shark" on that album, ya know?  Kryptos does do something kinda similar by opening with the title track, easily the most adrenaline fueled track on the record, but after that point it just kinda fills up with seven songs that might as well be titled "Not Afterburner". 

If you like this sort of rigid rule-following, Afterburner isn't a bad album, and the bursts of speed on the title track and "Crimson Queen" are very welcome (even if the drummer can't seem to match the speed of the riffs if his life depended on it), but I can't in good faith recommend this since it's so bland and unexciting.  I do recognize that Iron Maiden would still rule if they released Powerslave in 2019, but Afterburner is a clear imitation of the classics that came before it and doesn't really do anything to justify its own existence alongside said classics.


RATING: 40%

Idle Hands - Mana

Jackie-OOUGH

I've been sitting on this one since May.  This was a big deal when it was released back then, and it felt like everybody needed to have a hot take on it, but honestly I just couldn't bring myself to do it in good faith.  The reason is simple: I had no idea how I felt about it.  On first listen, I fell in love within the first few minutes, but by the time the fourth track had rolled around I had done a complete 180 and didn't want to finish it, only for the cycle to repeat several times during the forty minute runtime.  I've listened to this a few times a month in the ensuing six months and I've gone through this same ordeal several times.  It's rare that I don't have my feelings more or less sorted out by the end of the first listen of something, and each subsequent listens are spent merely dissecting and analyzing it slightly further.  You'd figure that means the album in question must be rather thought provoking and engaging since I'm, ya know, thinking about and engaging with it so often, but that's not really the case here.  Each new listen felt like the first listen again, like Mana was constantly being memory holed and rediscovered.  It's only been recently that I've been able to truly speechify what it is that I feel about it and why. 

This might be hard to believe, but I'm not being needlessly contrarian when I say that Idle Hands's debut, Mana, the album that has taken the metal world by storm and will surely find itself topping dozens of Best Of lists at the end of the year, actually fucking sucks, and the reason why is blindingly obvious now that I've finally put my finger on it.  It's a confused and thematically incoherent pop album with surface metal aesthetics (which isn't necessarily a bad thing, mind you, keep in mind I think Ghost is essentially the same thing but at least Meliora is pretty good) that structures itself around its weakest element.

In order for the first point to make sense, the second point needs to be explained.  On the broadest possible level, Mana is all about hooks over other typical metal tropes like aggression or riffs, with a strong second-tier focus on dark atmosphere.  I think the album's atmosphere is actually pretty good and consistently gloomy and gothy, that's not my problem.  My problem is that the hooks themselves are delivered via the clear weak link in the band.  The entire musical section of the band is competent and tight, and they may not be particularly rhythmically creative, but they all do their job pretty well for what they are.  The bass tends to just follow the rhythm guitar and the drums play simple rock beats with tragically rare bursts of speedy double bass, and the lead guitar lines are almost exclusively presented as clean arpeggios that rarely stop playing even during the loud moments.  The problem is that... none of those deliver the hooks that the album revolves around.  The arpeggios are more or less just background flourishes, and the rhythm section is a total joke in that department.  The songwriting creativity itself seems to revolved entirely around the novelty of mixing goth rock with heavy metal, but even then it pales in comparison bands like In Solitude and Tribulation who have tread similar ground in recent years, and falling light years behind the pack when it comes to actually metal and goth rock bands.  So what we get is a lowest common denominator worst-of-both-worlds scenario where the actual riffs are brain dead simple. 

Take "Nightfall" for example.  Let's get something clear, I like "Nightfall", and in fact I can pretty easily call it my favorite song on the album, but let's be fuckin' real it sounds like the actual band was a total afterthought in the writing process.  The track starts with five echo-y clean notes, a quarter second slide down the fretboard, and then, count 'em with me, a hundred and twenty eight straight palm muted open notes.  Eight fucking bars of sixteenth notes comprising of a whopping one god damned note.  I'm sorry are you kidding me?  I don't have a problem with simplicity but this is day zero level guitar playing.  The actual musical instruments are a total non-entity when it comes to Mana, and keep in mind I'm talking about the best fucking song on the album.  The rest of the tracks show a little more dexterity but not much, they're clearly meant to be a backing band here.

And that leads me to my main point here, those hooks I've been alluding to are delivered entirely via the vocals, and as you should've put together by now, the vocals are no bueno.  Gabriel Franco is the star of the show here and he is excessively mediocre.  His vocal style lands somewhere between overprojected melodrama (think a deeper and gothier Warrel Dane, for a metal parallel) and just kinda talking really loudly.  He has like a seven note range that he rarely wanders out of and utilizes this incredibly silly inflection that sounds like me reading my niece a bedtime story.  This is the biggest problem with the album and I feel like I can barely talk about it because I already covered everything there is to cover.  Obviously goth rock is a much bigger influence than metal on both the music and the vocals but with .01% of Andrew Eldritch's charisma.  It comes off straddling the line between laughably weak and pathetically hokey.  This is the exact same problem that Phil Collins of all people constantly struggles with.  Both the King of Pop for Divorced Dads and Idle Hands tend to craft songs with extremely sparse instrumentals.  Artists that do this usually do so to leave room for an incredible vocalist to wow you with a stunning performance, but Collins has the charisma of a biscuit with two shits inside of it and Franco sounds a theater kid with an ego five times the size of his singing ability.  He sounds so weepy and confident at the same time but his confidence betrays his actual ability to convey the emotion he's so clearly trying to convey.  His voice subtly cracks every now and again but it sounds so fucking phony, I hate it.  Even the occasional grunts feel forced as fuck.  Look at "Nightfall" again, those random shouts of OOUGH and the superliminal DO IT are pretty cool and fit with the song very well, but nearly every other time they appear it just feels like a shitty ad lib and fits less and less with each successive song.  It's like they realized oh shit we've got some dead space here quick do the Celtic Frost thing!

That thematic incoherence I mentioned comes into play here.  Most longtime readers of mine will probably notice that I almost never touch on lyrics (not because I think they don't matter, but because they're not the part of metal that I tend to care about so I usually don't pay too much attention), but I feel like I'm forced to here since there's so little else of interest.  The vocals are obviously the focus of the album, so they must have something to say.  But like... they don't?  The themes are all over the fuckin' place despite the consistently gloomy atmosphere.  "Nightfall" seems to be about ritualistic sacrifice, "Cosmic Overdrive" is about... actually driving?  "Don't Waste Your Time" is about... I dunno, somebody on their deathbed while the narrator is really smug about their religion or something?  "Dragon, Why Do You Cry?" I guess could be about childhood innocence leaving as you grow up but it could also be about a literal dragon that lives in the forest for all I know.  "Mana" seems to be the only track where there's any real emotional weight, touching on a parent grieving after their child's fatal heroin overdose... I think.  The rest of it is just straight up sophomoric angst.  Seriously this shit is so on the nose and at the same time vague and meaningless that it sounds like poetry I wrote when I was fifteen.  "Double Negative" is the least subtle and least poetic take on suicide I've heard since Sinergy's "Written in Stone", with the lyrics almost point blank painting deep emotions like "would you suffer without me?" and "I'm tired of living" with deeply personal lines like "would you suffer without me?" and "I'm tired of living".  "Jackie" and "A Single Solemn Rose" sound like unironic love songs, and if one of the characters is supposed to be dead or a vampire or something then fuck I had no idea, they sure as hell didn't make it clear in the lyrics about how much they love the anonymous person the song is about and how sad they are that they don't love them back.  I think the reason I'm so confused is paradoxically because everything is so blunt and direct, and I just can't fathom that a grown ass man is really writing about a regular ass breakup from the perspective of a 17 year old.  This is straight up r/im14andthisisdeep shit.

And can we talk about "Jackie" for a second?  I see this singled out as one of the better tracks fairly often and... y'all know this song blows, right?  I feel like Mugatu here being the only one who sees how nakedly obvious the song's flaws are, but here we are.  It's this shitty, sappy goth rock love song with a weak hook and childish lyrics.  Even if the lyrics are supposed to be darkly ironic, which I genuinely don't think they are, it comes off so fucking limp and lifeless that I genuinely don't understand how this song is even supposed to work.  So much of this album sounds like it was written in an afternoon (even the handful of good songs like "Give Me to the Night" and "Mana") and "Jackie" just epitomizes the lazy autopilot the album runs on.  This chorus sounds like a first draft and even Franco sounds bored as hell delivering his own lines.  Even on my first listen, before the flaws of the album became obvious to me, I still hated it on first listen.

I don't want to listen to this shit anymore, and it's wild to me that this became such a clear frontrunner on the year for so many people.  It's a weak, cliche goth rock album loaded with lame ballads and lamer lyrics and even lamerer musical qualities.  I barely understand goth rock myself and even I can understand that this is babby's first goth rock cliche 101 incarnate.  Simply not being a driving metal album in itself isn't a flaw.  I don't care that this is light, I care that it's wimpy and lifeless and all but like three hooks completely whiff.  Even the good songs (the ever present "Nightfall", "Give Me to the Night", "Blade of the Will", and the title track) kinda suck thanks to the shitty vocals and nonexistent backing band.  If they could expand on the actual blend of metal and goth like those songs do, Idle Hands would probably be at least decent and listenable, but they spend the lion's share of Mana trying to do pure hooky goth rock and they frankly fuckin' suck at it.


RATING: 26%

Skelator - Cyber Metal

Trent Dilfer as a metal singer

You probably wouldn't guess it since I'm a fucking nerd who has been reviewing metal albums on the internet for like 12 years and my trademark quirks are finding ways to reference Futurama and Final Fantasy as often as possible, but I'm also a big sports fan.  I've been watching nearly every Bears game every Sunday since 1997 and somewhere in the veritable sea of people during the 2013 Stanley Cup victory rally for the Blackhawks, you can spot me giving the finger to every camera I saw.  One thing that's always kind of baffled me about the sports world is how few players actually seem to be... good at what they do.  It's insane to me that out of the entire country, there's only ever like ten truly great quarterbacks at any given time.  How come nobody can throw as accurately as Tom Brady or score as consistently as Alexander Ovechkin?  Is Marshawn Lynch seriously the only guy who can break a tackle?  There are certain position players that can absolutely make or break a team, and sometimes you can fluke out if the rest of the team is strong enough, but other times it'll be the Achilles Heel that sinks a great season.  You can have a great defense but a shitty quarterback, and sometimes you'll be the 2000 Ravens and sometimes you'll be the 2006 Bears.

This problem persists in metal as well, because I swear it feels like sometimes a band with a great musical section can be completely fucking crippled by a terrible vocalist and it blows me away that they seriously can't find anybody better.  Skelator is the 2006 Bears in this scenario, with the band writing fun, ass kicking heavy metal analogous to the three phase domination led by Urlacher, Briggs, Tillman, Harris, and like ten other superstars, not to mention Hester breaking out as the greatest kick returner in history, but unfortunately they're saddled with Jason Conde-Houston on vocals, who is the Rex Grossman in this scenario, completely handicapping the band/team with fucking terribly thin vocals/a 1.3 QBR.

So yeah that's kinda this gist of it right there.  Cyber Metal is, from a musical standpoint, very good.  It's pretty basic 80s trad metal worship rife with dueling guitar melodies and grand galloping riffs, with drumming that stays fairly basic and almost never breaks out into high speed double bass.  It's very orthodox, "normal" metal but it's very competent and the songs themselves are well written and catchy.  A song like "Seven Scars" is primo throwback metal that I can't help but adore in almost every respect, and the adrenaline and tempo stay very high without ever transforming into power or speed metal.  All eight tracks are well written jams that could be a contender for throwback of the year.

But there's one hell of an elephant in the room here, and that's the vocals.  Just... holy shit they're so bad.  I can only assume the band sticks with this tuneless deadweight because he's an original member, because he sounds like a hybrid of James Rivera with a sinus infection and John Cyriis hiding behind a circus tent and huffing helium for a year.  Is there seriously not one single person on the west coast who can't sing better than this guy?  The album lasts a whopping eight seconds before he first belts out his laughably shrill harpy shriek before spending the next 40 minutes tunelessly wailing all over banging riffs.  This is such a huge bummer because this is seriously top ten on the year in terms of the musical department but he's so bad and so prominent that it's impossible to look past.  I don't care how cool it is that this is a lyrical cheesefest that indulges itself in schlocky anime like Fist of the North Star and features the A+ rhyme of "Laser eyes and napalm thighs" because the vocals are so wretched that I can only assume it's an intentional joke.  I'm actually somewhat familiar with this band already since I somehow wound up with a copy of Agents of Power like seven years ago, and I can say with utmost confidence that Jason has always been exactly this shitty and has zero chance of improvement in the future.  Ya know, I likened him to John Cyriis earlier, and I've always thought he kinda sucked too, but at least Agent Steel managed to bring monster hooks much more reliably than Skelator and his high pitched falsettos at least sounded intentional even if they always felt somewhat off.  I can't stress enough how fucking bad he is, it's criminal.

So yeah, this is a musical success but a vocal failure on a transcendental level.  Usually when I bitch about a trad metal vocalist sucking, it's because they sound bored and have no range.  This guy is special in that he can hit some crazy high notes but he manages to make not a single one of them actually gel with the music.  I can't recommend this in good faith, and if Skelator ever wants to be taken seriously as a viable force in trad metal revival, they absolutely need to cut fucking bait and drop this schmuck.  I don't care if he's the guitarist's brother, he sucks shit and needs to fucking go.


RATING: 38%

Metallica - Master of Puppets

HUNGRY BOB SEGER

I know, I know.  On the list of things the world needs right now, another fucking Master of Puppets review is pretty well near the bottom of the list.  But honestly, I just got a wild hair up my ass and I want to talk about Metallica.  Suck it up, nerds.

Metallica has somehow managed to survive no less than three or four extinction level career-enders throughout the years, and in many ways they're a constant punchline in the underground, for some valid reasons (the Napster lawsuit, St. Anger, the utter fucking absurdity of their reissues of classic albums), and some less valid (the Some Kind of Monster documentary, "selling out" with Load and cutting their hair in the 90s, whatever beautifully awful avant-garde disaster Lulu was), but I think it's easy to forget that once upon a time they were actually really god damned good.  Metallica ruled the fuckin' roost in the 80s, and I think it's easy to lose sight of just how big and impressive they were simply because we live in the internet age and can hear their more extreme contemporaries like Slayer or Dark Angel with a two second youtube search.  They were never the fastest or angriest or most brutal band in the world, but I think a big part of the charm is that they neither seemed to claim nor try to be.  They always just sorta did their own thing, helping to solidify what thrash metal was in the first place and then pretty much immediately breaking their own rules and doing weird shit like writing nine minute long instrumentals and punctuating blistering riff assaults with major-key doodly melodic shit.  They were never the only band doing these things, obviously, but they did have the biggest stage by the time the latter half of the decade rolled around and they leaned into what made them stand out.

To get one thing out of the way right off the bat, Master of Puppets is by no means their zenith, and in fact is actually an inferior 1:1 copy of it.  Ride the Lightning is better in almost every conceivable way.  The riffs are better, the songs are more well constructed, it has fucking "Creeping Death" on it, which was my favorite song in the world when I was a little kid and to this day I'd probably still put it in my top ten, it's just the superior record by almost every single metric.  The only areas where I'd say this album has the edge are the production (which is chunkier and heavier) and the vocals (which honestly just comes down to preference, I love the zit-faced voice-cracking exuberance of the first two albums but I'd give the edge to the slightly deeper and gruffer voice James starts sporting from here on out).  I know it's old hat to point out but the tracklist is ordered nearly identically as well, and it's something they'd stick to for basically the rest of their career.  Quiet intro leading into fast thrasher - title track (usually fast thrasher) - midpaced chuggy song - ballad - fast thrasher - midpaced melodic one - then usually the instrumental before closing on another fast thrasher (this was flipped on Ride but holds true on every other album that apes the formula).  Again, on a 1v1 comparison, Ride wins 7/8 times, with only "Leper Messiah" being clearly superior to "Escape".

But I'm not here to talk about how it's not as good as something else, I'm here to talk about how good it is on its own, and dammit it is good.  And it's good for kinda weird reasons at times.  One thing about the band in general that I didn't really appreciate until I was a bit older is just how fucking good of a rhythm player James Hetfield is.  Ask any guitar player and they'll tell you the same thing.  The man's dedication to downpicking damn near everything no matter the speed is unreal, his right wrist probably has a six pack.  Playing something like "Disposable Heroes" in one shot is a fucking endurance test for your picking hand, and he manages all of these things flawlessly.  It's not the most glamorous position in the world to be one of the best rhythm guitarists out there, but almost all of the band's tightness comes entirely from him.

And therein lies one of the things I love most about this album, it is somehow simultaneously their tightest offering while still being really loose.  Like a pair of bellbottoms, it's tight in the balls and loose at the ankles.  There are tempo shifts all over the place that the band obviously handles masterfully, but there are times where everything seems to kinda fall apart and it still sounds completely intentional.  Listen to "Battery" and really pay attention to the verse riff in relation to the vocals.  They almost sound like they're in completely different time sigs in completely different tempos.  The powerchords hit at strange, offputting times against the natural cadence of the lyrics, and it's all so god damned natural sounding that I never really noticed it until my 400th listen.  Also check out the verse riff to the title track.  The conventional wisdom (and official transcription) is that the verse riff consists of three measures in 4/4 time and tails on one measure of 5/8.  But if you actually play it as written it sounds completely wrong.  Switch that last bit to 6/8 and it sounds even wronger.  In actuality, through no real intention, that bar is actually played in fucking 21/32, purely because the guys were just playing by ear and doing whatever sounded right to them, and adding in that one random 32nd note of pause should've been a flow-breaking disaster that instead hits like a fucking hammer.  None of this was intentional progginess by a group of theory nerds, it's just what happens when you play by feeling and just run with the natural ebb and flow of your own manic riff-energy. 

Those two previous points tie into another thing I didn't really appreciate or understand until I was older, and that was just how... fucking weirdly wrong Lars's drumming is.  I didn't even notice this until it was pointed out to me, but he actually kinda fails miserably at the drummer's main fundamental job in any band.  He is not the timekeeper of the band, James is.  Whether his ineffable tightness is a coincidental complement or a learned necessity to Lars's bizarre, Bill Wardian sloppiness is up for debate, but that's what I meant when I said the band is tight entirely because of him earlier.  I had always thought of Lars as a brain dead simple rock drummer miscast in a thrash band, and I still think that to an extent, but once you start to really pick apart his performances you start to realize just how frequently he adds in rolling snare fills and random cymbal crashes at the least comprehensible times.  Listen to the outro of "Orion".  Just what the hell are you doing man?  Why is that china crash happening that one random ass time?  Why are you starting bars on random tom hits?  This odd looseness to his playing only amplifies that "tight but loose" thing I was talking about, the band is basically playing in free time but still sound like laser-guided riff machines.  And even with his incredibly obvious flaws, I always thought Lars (weak link though he is) was absolutely irreplaceable when it came to Metallica.  His style is so much more basic than pretty much every other thrash drummer, and I feel like his simplistic backbeats are a huge part of their identity and a big reason why they became as popular as they did in the first place.  Think about a track like "Disposable Heroes" or "Damage, Inc." and then think about how much fucking meaner and more extreme they would be if the only change was that Lars was replaced with Dave Lombardo or Ventor or something.  Would they be better?  I dunno, that's up to you to decide, but they would undoubtedly be much different if they were played in super precise double time and that one single change could make those songs simply un-Metallica.

I realize this is already getting pretty long and is very stream-of-consciousness, but honestly this is just a result of my lifelong relationship with the album.  My taste has quite obviously veered off into far more extreme directions over the years, but I've liked Metallica for literally as long as I've had memories, and I simply can not understate how utterly obsessed with them I was for years and years on end.  There are dozens of albums I've loved since I was a kid but comparatively few they I have actual memories tied to them.  For example, I think the seed for what would eventually blossom into my adulthood love of H.P. Lovecraft was planted more from "The Thing That Should Not Be" more than any other pop culture reference.  It certainly helps that I love the song on its own, I love that creepy, watery intro and I love how brutally it grinds along at a sluggish pace, repeatedly smashing you over the head over and over again until you're begging for a reprieve.  I can see why some would call it boring and repetitive, but god damn it works for me.  But no, what entranced me were the lyrics.  I know now that it's just kind of a lazy copy and paste of random Lovecraftian buzzwords, but when you're 8 years old you don't know that shit, dude.  To me it was so fucking dark and sinister and I felt almost like I was hearing something that I shouldn't.  It felt forbidden to my tiny brain.  I so distinctly remember laying on my bedroom floor while this song was playing, writing down the lyrics as I heard them and then drawing the images the lyrics conjured.  I know that what impressed me decades ago should mean nothing now that I'm a big brained boy, but simply hearing that chugging main riff instantly teleports me back to a sepia-toned warm-and-fuzzy of me doodling squiggly black-cloaked cultists conjuring an incomprehensible monster from the depths of a stormy sea.  Yeah I'm not being "objective" or whatever but if you're looking for objectivity in one of my reviews you can go eat sand and fuck back off to Minecraft you simpering git.

And since I've already gone this in-depth and personal, I might as well spray "Orion" with as much of my Burton Fanboy goo as possible.  It really isn't a stretch to say that "Orion" single-handedly solidified my choice to pick up a bass for the first time.  My heroes when I first started actually playing and writing (or at least attempting to write) my own music were Cliff and Geezer and basically nobody else, and I can't overstate how important this song was to me during that time.  All eight and a half minutes of this are coded into the muscles on my fingers, I made it such a point to learn this song front to back, and when I finally mastered it I felt like the king of the cosmos.  This really was Cliff's baby, you can tell.  He was the lone theory nerd in the band, he was the guy who had his nose buried in books and came up with most of the out-there melodicisms.  It was a popular thing for a while to say that Metallica never would've done what they did in the 90s if he was still alive but honestly he might've pushed them there even sooner.  "Orion" was his, he was the one with all of the less heavy ideas, he was the one who insisted on injecting melody into heaviness, he was the one who was into R.E.M. at the same time as he and the rest of the guys were pounding brews to Motorhead.  "Orion" is that marriage of jangly melodic bassiness blended with ripping palm mutes and screaming guitar solos that so encapsulated what Metallica was doing in 1986.  Everything was distilled into itself on "Orion" and I still love this song as much in 2019 as I did whenever it was that I first heard it.  That heavy "verse" riff that shows up a few times and carries out the heavy parts before the last fadeout is one of my favorite riffs of all time.  That gallop is just fucking sublime.

All that said, Master of Puppets is not without its flaws, I'm not completely blinded by nostalgia here.  The only real gripe I have with the album is "Sanitarium", which is, by a cosmic long shot, the shittiest "fourth track ballad" they produced in the classic run.  I'd argue that "The Day That Never Comes" is the lone worse one if you stretch it to their whole career, but "Fade to Black", "One", and "The Unforgiven" utterly demolish it in every way.  Hell even "Until It Sleeps", "The Unforgiven II", and the fuckin' Bob Seger cover on Garage Inc. completely trounce it.  This, to me, is the one song that feels completely obligatory.  It's like they were done with the album and then realized that their album formula required a ballad so they just ran back into the studio and banged one out in a half hour.  It's just totally unengaging apart from the solid bridge (and even then it's only like one chord away from recycling the verse riff from the title track wholesale), it just feels like the band sleepwalked through this one.  Whether you like the album or not, there's no denying that they weren't on autopilot for the other seven tracks.  You can't tear through something as explosive as "Battery" or as groovy and infectious as "Leper Messiah" without actually trying, but "Sanitarium" is the one and only point where it really sounds like they weren't.

I'm not sure if I've actually gotten my points across well here, and I might regret hitting the publish button as soon as I click it, but right now I just don't care.  I love Master of Puppets, it was a super important album to me and I think it still easily holds up today now that I spend way more time listening to Dying Fetus and Pissgrave.  I might've lost the plot a bit throughout this but I've gotten this far without bringing up the weird status this has gotten with the Extremely Online kids who went from noobs to know-it-alls within six months thanks to how easy it is to just stream music nowadays, but it's worth mentioning that this album doesn't deserve to be the battleground it's become.  It's extremely popular because at the time this was the thrash album with the most reach and accessibility.  Metallica opening for Ozzy in 86 gave them such a huge stage that this album has the distinction of selling over a million copies with no radio singles or music videos.  This wasn't the heaviest thing in 1986, lest you all forget that one of my favorite albums of all time is Reign in Blood so don't think I'm being obtuse here, but it was one of the most accessible and easy to get into.  And it's because of that relative safety of excellent songwriting coupled with frantically intense riffs and sheer aggression blended with just enough melody to catch ears and just enough extremity to be explosive without being alienating that likely millions of people even got into metal in the first place.  I'm not saying that we should be extra nice to this album and not judge it on its own merits simply because it was important and released at the exact right time, but I am saying that if you willingly ignore context on a selective basis (like saying it doesn't matter that this opened so many doors for so many people but it does matter that Dark Angel was faster and heavier) then you should know that I probably think you're a vacuous dullard with little else to be proud of beyond your ego.  Master of Puppets is an excellent record with a lot of ideas and most of them hit bullseye.

That's what matters to me.


RATING: 94%

Enforcer - Zenith

That's a bold strategy, Cotton

I've never actually reviewed them up to this point, surprisingly, but people who follow along on this blog instead of just reading my stuff on MA should know by now that I'm a pretty big fucking fan of Enforcer.  Since I started publishing official Best Of lists at the end of every year, starting for the year 2010, every single Enforcer album released during that timespan has finished in the top four.  Diamonds in 2010 was my #2, Death by Fire in 2013 was my #4, and From Beyond in 2015 was my #3.  They haven't been particularly prolific over this past decade, but their streak of astoundingly consistent excellency has kept them on my radar ever since I first heard them, and I've been waiting with bated breath for this latest offering, Zenith.  How could I not?  They've never even moderately let me down before.

I don't start reviews with big monuments of praise like that unless I'm about to be let down.  I've been doing this a long time, I'm aware of my patterns.

Yeah, Zenith is super frustrating because it's both good and bad, and mostly it's just a massive letdown because the band has almost wholly abandoned what they're good at.  For the uninitiated, Enforcer were god damned six hundredth degree black belts in 80s throwback speed metal.  They didn't quite play that distinctly German sound of early Helloween or Blind Guardian.  Instead they had a weirdly North American flair akin to Exciter or Razor's first album, the kind that never quite veered into thrash but would've clearly been a huge influence if they had actually existed in 1981 like they sound.  Despite that, their ear for catchy hooks and choruses was absolutely unreal, nailing this early trad metal quality of making these songs fast and intense while also being maddeningly catchy.  I always felt like an outsider saying this, but I always felt like they had an understated but notable influence from glam as well.  Dead serious, something like Death by Fire sounds like a hypothetical truce between Metallica and Motley Crue before doing rails of blow and covering a bunch of Raven songs.

And that's where Zenith comes in, because that subtle glam influence that I noted back then has suddenly become the only god damned thing the band wants to do.  This is frustrating because honestly it's not like the band sucks at mid paced anthemic glam metal, "Die for the Devil" is unbelievably ear catching, as is "Sail On".  They're decently good at emulating Def Leppard and Bon Jovi.  The problem is who the fuck wanted this??  What schmuck heard "Death Rides This Night" or "Below the Slumber" and said "man this band is good and all but they'd be a thousand times better if they just stopped being so energetic and focused entirely on catchy hooks and forgot every single other thing about their sound".  Zenith is the sound of a band absolutely slamming on the brakes with both feet and flipping a u-ey so hard that their car comes a few millimeters from tumbling several times.  Death by Fire was faster and meaner than Diamonds, From Beyond was darker than Death by Fire, they seemed to be on track to accidentally inventing thrash metal a second time and then just decided to give up and write Girls, Girls, Girls instead.  This is so frustrating, I can't imagine this being what any Enforcer fan was hoping for after a four year break in the release schedule.

I realize that this is coming off similar to my thoughts on Skeletonwitch last year where my complaints basically amounted to "They changed it so it sucks now", which is a total non-complaint in a vacuum.  I get that, but I feel like the key difference in my complaint is that unlike most traditionalist whiners afraid of change, I welcome change and evolution as long as a band doesn't abandon what they're good at, and that's exactly what Enforcer did here.  That speed and adrenaline is just totally gone here apart from two notable tracks.  That's not to say these songs aren't spirited, because they definitely are.  The band does not sound like they're going through the motions here, even the lamest of these songs (apart from the ballad "Regrets", which is a complete flop) feels like the band put their entire hearts into it.  "Die for the Devil" is genuinely great, and could have been a massive radio smash back in the halcyon years of glam several decades ago, "Forever We Worship the Dark" is a hook-filled monster, and I think "The End of a Universe" has some incredible vocal acrobatics that help it stand out.  But at the end of the day it's just regular-ass catchy heavy metal/hard rock with a few good hooks and great vocals, which is something that scratches an itch now and again and that's about it.  It's just extra disappointing when taken in the context of this band's career as a whole.  In a vacuum, I can say this album is decent with a song or two that really stands out, but when you take into account that this is the capstone of a band that absolutely dominated the decade with an iron fist on the backs of balls to the wall frothing speed metal, this just sounds like them closing out the decade with a pitiful bunny fart.

I will give credit where credit is due though, and that's the tracks "Searching for You" and "Thunder and Hell".  The former is admittedly a total cocktease because the verses are primo classic Enforcer, with all of the fire and speed that made them so superlative in the first place, but the chorus itself is a hard left turn back into the midpaced glam that populates the rest of the record.  It works much better here as a contrast to the blistering verses instead of just being another part that fades into a song that doesn't stand out much on its own, but it's still kind of a disappointment that they couldn't keep it up the whole time.  That's where "Thunder and Hell" succeeds, because that's the one and only track that could've fit right at home on any of their previous albums.  "Thunder and Hell" is 100% what I had hoped Zenith would be.  You could argue that I'm just a lunkhead who wants more of the same since this sounds very similar to previous classics like "Undying Evil" or "Midnight Vice", but dammit man that's the exact reason I fell in love with the band in the first place.  This is what they're good at.  Full speed or no speed man!  Go absolutely fucking wild and damn the torpedoes!

So yeah, this is an incredibly frustrating album.  "Thunder and Hell" and "Searching for You" sound like classic Enforcer and unsurprisingly absolutely smoke, and "Die for the Devil" and "Forever We Worship the Dark" are examples of how their new sound can work masterfully.  But the rest of it is just... not what Enforcer should be doing.  I get it, this album isn't for me, and I don't really like it all that much because it's not what I wanted it to be, and you can say that's a childish reason to dislike something and I'm doing this album a disservice by not being "objective".  But the truth is that that's the real reason we dislike almost everything we dislike, isn't it?  Reviews are subjective by nature and music evokes an emotional response, it's not a fucking math equation that you can spit out true numbers to truly assess.  It's qualitative, not quantitative.  If you want the "objective" analysis of the album, I could just say it's generally midpaced with little atmosphere that focuses on competently written and played hooks with a few random bursts of speed.  But that's a short and shitty review, and the truth is that all of those things need to be taken into the context of what the band had done before, and the hard pill to swallow is that Enforcer is merely decent at this style, and they became decent at one style at the expense of ditching a style they were the best in the world at.  If that doesn't sting just a little bit as a fan of what they had accomplished before, then there's no hope for you.


RATING: 44%

The Lord Weird Slough Feg - New Organon

Welcome home, Philosopher Cavemen

I'm not gonna lie to you guys, I was really fuckin' stoked to hear this one.  Yeah that may be a surprise considering how much I disliked their most recent album, Digital Resistance, but it's true.  A lot of things haven't necessarily been falling in Slough Feg's favor over the last decade.  In the last ten years they've only managed to release three albums, one of which sucked, one of which had some good songs but some really bad ones that brought it down (Ape Uprising!), and thankfully at least one that was really good (The Animal Spirits).  In addition to their new slow pace of releasing albums, they had the unfortunate honor of helping introduce the metal scene to one of the most talented drummers on the scene today only to completely underutilize him.  Harry Cantwell is incredible at what he does, but in order to hear any of his skill you'll have to look towards Bosse-de-Nage or Succumb, because in Slough Feg his was moderately quirky with his off kilter rhythms but that was it, only fully letting lose in his other bands.  I was always hoping he'd shine on a future Slough Feg album, but sadly he dipped out shortly after the last album.  So now the band is left here in a weird time, immediately following an underwhelming album, immediately following the departure of an invaluably talented bandmate, and they responded by... just kinda disappearing for half a decade.

But they're back now, and they've reached pretty far back into their history to deliver to us New Organon.  Surely one of the first things you've noticed is that they've gone back to using the lengthened version of their name, now officially "The Lord Weird" once again.  This in itself doesn't really mean anything since the two eras can barely be separated thematically.  Slough Feg has always been all over the place in that regard.  You're never sure if an album is going to be about the future (Traveller, Hardworlder, Digital Resistance) or the past (Twilight of the Idols, Atavism, Ape Uprising!, The Animal Spirits), generally speaking, and that's not to say that individual songs on each album won't stray from whatever lose theme they're working with anyway.  The point is that somehow they always sound "primitive" regardless of whether they're spinning yarns about ancient myths or fantastical science fiction.  I guess they always remind me of a Harry Harrison book I read many years ago, Deathworld.  The basic premise is that it's the far flung future, and there's a colonized planet absolutely infested with hostile flora and fauna that spend every second of every day attacking the technologically advanced human settlement, and the only people who have managed to fully adapt to the toxic hellscape are the semi-nomadic outcasts who have learned to live off the land and live in harmony with the strange creatures that inhabit it.  The protagonist of the story tries to bring the two lifestyles together in some way to maximize survivability, and likewise Slough Feg is this weird, roving hermit of a band who seems to have all of these bizarre forward thinking ideas and visions of a weird, horrible future, while at the same time understanding the land itself completely and thriving as a primitive group of hunter-gatherers. 

This all comes up partly because I'm bad at organizing my thoughts, but also because I just don't know how else to describe a track like "Headhunter".  The album starts off with this groovy, rollicking thumper of a track that hearkens back to their late 90s era, with the only notable difference being Mike Scalzi's voice being much more throaty and hoarse than before.  It is so refreshing to hear a song with this much fucking life in it after the mostly drab experience of the previous album.  Despite my usual coded language, I mean it plainly this time.  This is exuberant and exciting, but it's not fast or aggressive or anything like I usually imply when I use words like that.  New Organon is a very laid back and midpaced album, with only "Being and Nothingness" and "Uncanny" truly breaking into higher tempos.  This is Slough Feg's niche, nobody else really seems to take these walking gallops and trot them out with nearly as much spirited efficiency.  They've always been good at this, and I think Mike's outspoken desire to let this album happen at its own pace was a huge boon to the final product.  Digital Resistance was by no means rushed, but it did feel like it was done mostly on autopilot.  New Organon on the other hand is inspired and lively. 

As per usual, there are a ton of ideas at work here.  From the bluesy heavy rock of "The Apology" and "Exegesis - Tragic Hooligan", to the searing metal assault of "Uncanny", the groovy throwback jams of "Headhunter" and the title track, and you're going to think I'm crazy here, but I think you could simply change the instrumentation of "Coming of Age in the Milky Way" and it could pass as a 50s doo-wop single or a lame 60s hippie song or some hybrid thereof with minimal raised eyebrows.  Slough Feg is so fucking good at everything they do here, and it showcases their incredible ability to sound both new and old simultaneously.  The whole album has a very 70s feel, throwing back to a time when heavy metal wasn't even really a thing yet but they managed to accidentally invent it anyway by playing in 2019, 1972, and the Paleolithic Age all at once.  It's so strange that they're objectively decades late to the party, playing almost three decades into their career, and still sounding like they both somehow invented the whole style and have the only definitive vision of where it's going.  It's like some bastardized New School Proto Metal or something.  I don't know, I love it.  Most of New Organon sits in a very comforting groove, making the few fast tracks hit all the harder.  And they're so good at riffs and hooks anyway that it stays engaging regardless of the tempo. 

If there are any flaws, they're fairly minor.  "Sword of Machiavelli" and "The Cynic" just kinda happen without much consequence, but the latter is saved by the band's trademark dizzying soloing.  The album as a whole kind of loses steam as it goes on, but the A side is such a stunner that it barely matters and the back half has grown on me a lot in the few days and already countless spins I've given this.  "Uncanny" is kind of awkward at first because Adrian sings it instead of Mike, and... well there's a reason Adrian isn't the singer.  Even so, his nasally voice has grown on me as well in the context of the song proper and the song was an instrumental highlight right away, before I had gotten accustomed to his voice in the first place. 

Without a doubt, Slough Feg are the Weird Lords again.  This is by far their most metallic album in a decade and it still retains their trademark Thin Lizzy-esque blues rock swagger that they've spend the last few albums honing.  This isn't their best album by any stretch, but that's also taking into account that they have at minimum four albums I'd score above 95% already.  Basically this is the exact kind of thing that legacy bands should be doing in this day and age.  Yeah they're a lot younger than Judas Priest or something, but New Organon is a great example of reaching back to a your roots without being a dry rehash of something you've already done.  There is only one truly unworthy song on here, and the rest of it ranges from good to great.  "Headhunter" and "New Organon" are easily right up there with any of their previous classic tracks, and "Uncanny", "Being and Nothingness", and "The Apology" are barely a hair behind.


RATING: 90%

Pulver - Kings Under the Sand

Needs more balls to more walls

My ancestors on both sides of my family immigrated to America like 200+ years ago, so thanks to having like five generations of my family born and buried in the same town, I have zero tangible links to my European ancestry.  I've been thoroughly Americanized.  You'll never catch me in a lederhosen with a stein of lager, is my point.  But to my knowledge, if you trace one aspect of my lineage as far back as the records will go, I'm like 90% sure that a good chunk of my family originated in Bavaria.  So I have some ancestral link with Pulver's homeland somewhere a dozen or so generations down my line, so fuck it, I feel like I'm obligated to give them a chance.

I say a chance and not a recommendation because yikes did this need some more time in the oven.

Pulver is what happens when kids get together and start a band before they're actually any good at the practical aspects of being in a metal band beyond simply having big dreams.  Kings Under the Sand sounds like what happens when you master step one of your respective instrument (tune it properly and play in time) and then just immediately fuck off to go writing songs.  Pulver draws a lot of comparisons to Tank thanks to the vocals sounding an awful lot like Algy Ward, but there's a whole lot more to Tank than simply having cool gruff vocals.  Pulver sounds like Tank in slow motion.

I think the overarching problem beyond the songs just not being very good is that this has precisely zero ambition beyond recreating something that was already successful nearly 40 years ago.  It's like these guys sat down with a notebook and wrote down their goals for the band and landed on exactly two bullet points.  1: No influences can extend beyond 1985.  2: Great bands like Iron Maiden and Riot had a mascot, therefore we can't be a great band without a mascot either.  They make it a point to slap this Phantom Hawk character on the cover and title the first real song after him, and offer some sort of backstory to his existence in press junkets, but it's really not unique or exciting to attach recognizable characters to metal albums anymore.  Eddie and Vic Rattlehead and Snaggletooth were all just cool evil looking things that helped bands stand out before you could just look up anything and everything on youtube before commiting to a purchase, so not only have metal mascots lost their functional purpose, but any new band attempting to recreate that trope from metal's heyday is just going to look like a tryhard dork right out of the gate.  Maybe it's a stupid point to harp on what's fashionable in metal, but this is just silly and dumb.  Nobody gives a shit about the backstory to your album art, that's the exact shit that Iced Earth gets made fun of for, knock it off.

Beyond the aesthetic eyerolls, the music itself is just ultra-green and weak.  Calling this album "midpaced" would be too generous, because apart from about half of "Blacksmith's Lament", the title track, and one brief dueling melody in "Alpha Omega" (which boast a top speed of "about a hair slower than 'Sharp Dressed Man'"), Kings Under the Sand is maddeningly slow.  I don't mean "doomy", I mean slow.  It's so fucking frustrating because it makes the album feel so much longer than it is.  Everything is sluggish and lethargic, just dozily plopping along with a pace that I couldn't even favorably call "deliberate".  Obviously not every band needs to take influence from Motorhead (as awesome as that would be) and needs to push the limits of speed for their era, but a big part of why that boom of heavy metal out of Europe in the late 70s and early 80s was so exciting was because everything was so reckless and unhinged.  If you're going to take heaps of influence from Tank and Accept, do yourselves a fucking favor and venture outside of the 100bpm ceiling.  That wild and daring youth that drove these bands to all strive to outdo each other is completely absent here.  Instead of a drunken madman flinging beer bottles against the wall and picking fights in the pub, this is drunken in the sense of a broken and despondent vagrant who hasn't shaved in months lazily stumbling towards an alleyway before shooing a cat out of his favorite piss-soaked blanket.  Nearly every riff on the album emulates that fun era near the dawn of the 80s when the muscular hard rock of the 70s was truly forming into a sound that was distinctly recognizable as heavy metal, but Pulver missed the memo that energy and presentation was every bit as important a part of the package.  Trying to sit through the droning mess of "Phantom Hawk" or "Warrior Caste" is a chore, and I'm amazed that these guys really thought this was the best way to introduce themselves.

And before anybody accuses me of simply wanting the band to be something they're not, I'll concede that you're partially correct, because of course I want every band to be better than they are, but I'll counter with the track "Qarinah", because that one is just as slow and plodding as the rest of them, but that one just fucking works.  The tom-heavy drums just fucking pound their hearts out on this one, and the main riff is so fucking groovy and heavy that the pace complements it perfectly.  "Qarinah" is the sole track with any lingering sense of unpredictable danger.  There's a brief moment around the two minute mark where the pounding riff just drops off for a measure and you're hit with a solid second and a half of silence before it comes crashing through again, and it's just a damn awesome effect.  There's proof here that Pulver can indeed accomplish some cool stuff with this complete lack of urgency, it's just a shame that it's precisely one song that manages to do it correctly while the rest of it has so little attitude.  The very next track, "Warrior Caste", is almost hilarious because it's basically the exact same idea but shitty.  It's like if Eternal Champion had written a song in an afternoon while they were all 15.

Reckless and wild, this is not.  Kings Under the Sand is an incredibly frustrating experience because it just never gets to the point and farts around with warm up riffs and non-starter ideas before just ending on a whimper.  The vocals are kinda cool since they have a unique chainsmoking coarseness to them, but the music surrounding it is so fucking toothless and lame that I just can't in good faith recommend this.  "Qarinah" is a pretty solid track showcasing how this sluggish style can work, but the other seven songs are glaring condemnations as to why it doesn't. 


RATING: 22%

Iron Griffin - Curse of the Sky

Not Emperor sunglasses

One of the more infamous interviews in metal history is an interview from Rock Guerilla TV with Fenriz in 2005.  It featured a very obviously drunk Fenriz and a very obviously drunk interviewer with the worst hair on record, hanging out in his dingy studio apartment, surrounded by heaps of dirty laundry, making incredibly awkward conversation, all while Fenriz drops hilarious drunken nuggets of weirdness every few minutes.  "BIG sunglasses, not Emperor sunglasses, always big sunglasses, cool band", "You know Elvis on his belt bucket said T-C-B", "HOW MUCH PRIMITIVE CAN YOU GET??", the entire "Rock and Roll Gas Station" sequence, it's a fucking riot and I recommend everybody watch it twice.

But I bring it up because the very first question asked of him produces a very weird answer.  The interviewer asks what he's been listening to lately, and Fenriz answers "Boring thrash with really great vocals."  If you swapped out "thrash" with "trad metal", you'd have Iron Griffin to a T.

Iron Griffin is a two person operation, with Oskari Rasanen (drummer of Mausoleum Gate) doing a terrible job of playing every instrument, and Maija Tiljander absolutely kicking ass as the vocalist.  The gulf between the two members' talent is obvious from the second she first opens her mouth.  At first I just thought Curse of the Sky would be simply boring and weak trad revival of the Cruz del Sur variety (so very Slough Feg-ish with a lot of bounce in the gallops), because that's exactly how "Reign of Thunder" starts out.  It begins with incredibly toothless guitars, dully puttering out beginner-level power chords with absolutely no fire or gusto behind them.  But once the verse begins and Maija hits the second line and first showcases her masterful wailing vibrato, all of the sudden the music itself becomes insulting.  I can't stress enough how little actually happens during the thirty minute runtime of this debut.  It's astounding to me that somebody who so clearly has so little vision or ambition could want to take on what is essentially a solo project purely for the ability to have total control, because that's the only conceivable reason he'd be doing this.  He clearly isn't a very skilled guitarist, there is nothing interesting or aggressive or moody or atmospheric or anything that makes a bog standard riff anything other than bog standard.  Stale ass rhythms, unexciting chord progressions, weak tone, no cool leads, just not one god damned thing happens with the instruments on here and it blows me away that somebody could produce so little on instruments he's clearly not particularly skilled at playing and decide "Yeah this is ready to go to press."  It's all mid/slow paced gallops and dreary minor melodies that evoke little more than a disinterested yawn.  Even his backing vocals sound like he's barely trying, it's shameful.

And yet, Curse of the Sky isn't completely worthless, because god dammit I am in love with these vocals.  She reminds me a lot of Witch Mountain's original vocalist with how fucking clean and smooth her delivery is while still packing more power and bravado into each and every line than Manowar has managed across their last six albums in total.  She does a lot of wailing and oversinging but man I just don't care, she sounds like a Valkyrie with lungs six times the size of her whole body.  Check out the out-chorus on the title track, for as restrained and uninteresting the riffs are, she almost singlehandedly makes up for it with the wails of an extraordinarily desperate siren.  This is everything I didn't know I wanted and I can't praise it enough.  For every dumbass riff with no bite, there is at least one absolutely stunning vocal acrobatic to keep me from the stop button.

So just like how Fenriz can find Detente a worthwhile band based entirely on great vocals alone, I can almost say the same with Iron Griffin.  Unfortunately, the end result is me basically just wishing she was in a much better band, because this is duller than the back end of a spoon.  Curse of the Sky is very neutered and unexciting, with basically zero musical moments that stir my insides whatsoever, and as great as Maija's stentorian vibrancy is, she alone can't save this dishwater-bland nothing-album.  Believe me when I say this would easily score thirty points lower without her.


RATING: 39%

Frenzy - Blind Justice

Still don't care about the MCU thank you don't @ me

Wanna know the real reason I don't have any friends?  It's not because I'm an alcoholic or because I'm not entirely sure what a toothbrush is or because my King Diamond impression is terrible.  No, it's because I just flat out don't fuckin' care about superheroes.  I liked 'em as a kid, sure, but the last comic book/superhero movie I've seen in theaters was... I dunno, Spiderman 2 back in 2004?  The current glut of superhero mania has left me completely cold and apparently locked me out of all social functions for the past 15 years simply because I just can't bring myself to give a single shit about the latest colorful explosion of glittery Marvel puke all over every screen in the universe. 

So with that in mind, it was a no brainer for me to zero in on the debut Frenzy album, Blind Justice, when I got my latest batch of promos.  An obvious reference to Daredevil, presented with an album cover clearly designed to evoke memories of classic comic books, with song titles that are all obvious allusions to other comics?  Fuck yeah, I get to be smug and dunk on nerds for a few hundred words again.  Score!

Imagine my disappointment when Blind Justice actually wound up being... good.

Yeah I'm actually kinda mad that I like this, because all signs point to this being a low-effort snoozefest attempting to capitalize on a trend that apparently won't die, but dammit Frenzy is actually really damn solid.  On the surface this is just regular-ass heavy metal with no adventurous songwriting, but beneath that this is just... well, regular-ass heavy metal, but the safety in cliche manifests more as simple confidence in what they're doing with no frills or unnecessary window dressing.  I wish there was more to say about it, but there really isn't.  Frenzy just plays what has been nominally played out for decades but they do it with a lot of style and bravado that makes it akin to comfort food.

This is 80s to the bone, with songs spending about half the time in a double bass frenzy of the fastest that Judas Priest and Dokken had to offer, with the other half being more traditional mid paced stuff akin to Accept or Iron Maiden.  So their influences are all the most obvious bands you could imagine, but they play with a lot of style and sheer black-toothed attitude so it really doesn't matter.  The vocalist is clearly the highlight here, and it's for something that I haven't actually seen anybody else mention.  Namely, his higher register sounds just like Klaus Meine in his prime.  I may not be the biggest Scorpions fan in the world, but there's no denying that Klaus has got some fuckin' pipes on him, and Anthony Stephen here channels him brilliantly.  Check out "Save Me", it's absolutely undeniable.  The rest of the band is solid as well, with the guitarists keeping things entertaining enough, though only really stealing the show on the closer, "Shred or Die", which is about six and a half minutes long and I swear nine minutes of it are taken up by nutso soloing. 

So that's really all there is to this.  This is a short one because fuck dude, what do you want me to say?  It's solid heavy metal that we've all heard a million times before but it's energetic and raucous enough to be a fun listen on occasion.  I'd really love it if I went the rest of my life without encountering one more piece of media that shouts how awesome Batman is at me, but the confetti explosions of "Waiting on Your Call" and "Killing with a Smile" are cool enough for me to stomach it this time.  The more anthemic singalong like "Save Me", "We are the Future", and "Mad Ball" are fun and catchy, while the speedier assaults like "Blind Justice", "Velocity", and "Shred or Die" are a whirlwind of exciting cheese.  Blind Justice is nothing truly special, but it's certainly better than it has any right to be.


RATING: 79%

Satan's Hallow - Satan's Hallow

Everybody shut up, I found the new "thing"

Every year, there's a new traditionally styled heavy metal band that just takes MA inexplicably by storm.  Last year Sumerlands and Eternal Champion fought for the title, the year prior it was Visigoth, and before then we had In Solitude, Portrait, Hell, Briton Rites, et cetera forever.  It's always fun to see who the new "flavor of the year" is going to be, because I get caught up in the hype as well and wind up liking damn near every band that wins the Fluke New Old School Hit Sweepstakes.  Well last month, the signs start showing as I notice the burgeoning hype train for Satan's Hallow.  Considering they're from my home(ish)town, I figured I better get the jump on them.  Y'all know my predilection for anything from Chicago or the surrounding areas (it's how I found out Smash Potater was actually awesome and not some effortless joke, for example).  Plus, it's important to me to predict their eventual overtaking of High Spirits as the current Cult Heroes of Chicago if they're really that good.

Yeah holy fucking Christ on a cracker, Satan's Hallow delivers. 

I was taken aback in the opening seconds.  I like old school heavy metal as well as anybody, but man there's always something special when you can catch a band that so distinctly nails the sounds and idiosyncrasies of the decade without falling into the traps of easy cliches.  No way, Satan's Hallow sounds straight out of the early 80s, but not because they're just tracing over an already-successful painting.  This self titled debut is a work of art in its own right, merely taking the foundation of early trad metal in the vein of Judas Priest and Accept and just punching it in the face as hard as possible as opposed to just dressing up in a costume and ripping them off instead.  It's such a basic thing but a surprising amount of bands somehow completely drop the ball in that regard.

Anyway, the important thing here is that these dudes bring it hard.  One thing that stands out right off the bat are the vocals, which are drawing a lot of comparisons to Warlock and the assorted bands that burst through the floodgates opened by Doro Pesch based entirely on the fact that the band is female fronted.  Now, a similarity is there, don't get me wrong, but Martillo here takes a slightly different approach that warrants a distinction.  She doesn't belt out quite as hard or as rough as Doro may, but she makes up for it with sheer energy and enthusiasm.  There's a very tight and nearly imperceptible falsetto to a lot of these screams, which adds to the completely unhinged nature of the music.  It's like she's just about to fall apart completely, she's singing her heart out in such a manic and Heavy Fucking Metal way, I love everything about it.  It's very theatrical, much like David Bower from Hell.

In fact, Hell is a very good comparison for the band in general.  That theatricality of the band is showcased in every aspect while managing to remain grounded and unpretentious.  Think Iron Maiden at their best.  The bass is prominent and gallops liberally, while guitar melodies float above every song like a marionette's strings, guiding and propelling the band forwards at every opportunity.  There's a damn evil atmosphere here as well, just languidly hanging over the music in a way that complements the journey as opposed to wrestling the propulsive heavy metal out of the spotlight, just everything they do somehow hits bullseye.

I don't want to keep comparing this to obvious classic bands like Iron Maiden and Judas Priest, but I'll be damned if the influence isn't strong and the quality isn't comparable.  Listen to "Still Alive".  That's straight up a lost Maiden track from the Powerslave sessions.  Listen to "Hot Passion".  That's straight up a lost Priest track from the Defenders of the Faith sessions.  Listen to "Choir of the Cursed", that's straight up a lost Mercyful Fate track from the Melissa sessions.  I could do this all night, these guys own their influences with aplomb.  There are no apologies to be found anywhere here, it's just straight ahead, bare-knuckle heavy metal overflowing with solos and a boatload of attitude.  I can't even fault it for nearly every song sounding the same (with the exception of "Still Alive", which takes a slower and more atmospheric approach), because they all completely smoke.  The furious closer, "Beyond the Bells" currently stands as my favorite track, but I feel like it could change at a moment's notice, considering I think "Reaching for the Night", "Hot Passion", "Black Angel", and damn near every other song is equally as strong.

I can't stop gushing, this is everything an old school metalhead should want.  Guitar pyrotechnics, more melodies than I can even begin to fathom, a frantic and wild vocal performance, and some of the strongest songwriting I've heard since Visigoth first crushed my skull two years ago.  I know it's early in the year, but this is already a serious contender for Album of the Year.  I've heard good albums this year, I've heard some damn good albums in 2017, but only Satan's Hallow has so far delivered so strongly that I had to pencil it in for the top spot.  Charging riffs, immutable attitude, unapologetic energy, and super tight songwriting that delivers a loose, fun, and undeniably raw experience.  Get on this hype train, I'm the fucking conductor now.

Also we really need to talk about how much the bassist looks like Lloyd Christmas.

RATING - 94%

QUICK HITS: Striker - Striker

The 12 month plan

Longtime readers of mine may remember that Striker actually released the very first album to win my official Album of the Year award back in 2010 (with Eyes in the Night, which still holds up and absolutely fucking rules), but my relationship with them has been sorta weird ever since then.  I always compare them to Enforcer since they came out around roughly the same time and helped spearhead this trad metal revival in the late 00s/early 10s, but Enforcer has been slugging home run after home run whereas Striker only managed one more total classic (City of Gold) and two other decent albums that didn't stick with me (Armed to the Teeth and Stand in the Fire).  Barely a year after the latter album, they're back already with a shorter, more streamlined self titled album, and I've gotta say they're keeping with the "good album - meh album" flip flopping, because this one is awesome.  Excluding the bonus track and the short interlude, there are only eight tracks here compared to the previous album's eleven, and it works to their advantage because they've always been a shallow band of surface flash (which obviously doesn't bother me, there's a reason I listen to fifty generic speed metal bands for every one complex prog band) so it doesn't overstay its welcome.  At just a little over a half hour long, this is a great blast of energy, blazing leads, and some of the heaviest riffing they've ever managed.  Seriously, tracks like "Over the Top", "Curse of the Dead", and "Pass Me By" just utterly decimate any of their previous songs in terms of ferocity.  There are some more traditional rockers like "Rock the Night" but those quick and heavy cookers are the true standouts of the album.  Special mention has to be made for "Born to Lose" as well for being one of their best tracks yet.  It's not as speedy and vicious as something like "Pass Me By" but it's certainly one of the catchiest tracks they've penned yet.  It's not their strongest album, and I'd say it's probably right smack in the middle of their five albums, but that has more to do with how phenomenal the good albums are and how sharp the dropoff is for their more mediocre ones.  Give it a go, it certainly rocks more than it has any right to.

RATING - 81%