“Physicists have long grappled with the enigma that is time travel and while jaunting to the future remains plausible, going the other way is all but an impossible dream. Pfffff, impossible to a lab coat-wearing egghead, maybe, but not to Finland’s Rivette, who have stuck two fingers up the nose of relativity with their debut EP, In Vertigo.” Up yours, Einstein!
“Stylistically Quartz play traditional heavy metal in the vein of Judas Priest and Saxon, and Fear No Evil has a distinctively old school flavor. Everything about it, from the chord progressions and melodies to the warm, uncomplicated production sounds as though it was pulled straight from the early ‘80s, lending it a reassuringly authentic quality, and first impressions are positive.” Retro, Shaggy!
Alright, we’ve been out a while and need to maintain a strict publishing schedule, which means I’m going to nail some quick hits to the wall and then you’re not going to get to hear much more about these records.
Rage has been around for fucking ever. If you consider that this is the band’s 21st record (I’ll bet you could’ve never told from the name), that means that these guys have been one of the most productive bands in the history of metal. Where other bands seemingly get to the point in their career where they’re putting out an album every four or five years, these guys have just continued being productive. However, just because they’re productive doesn’t mean that everything they’re putting out was golden. One can think about the drop off from 2006’s Speak of the Dead to 2008’s less than stellar Carved in Stone. But, of course, the band recouped and put out Strings to a Web with all the gumption a band of their caliber should have. So now here we have it, the band’s 21st record, named for the event, and coming out in just a few days.
Cormorant is a band that I probably would have never found on my own. Instead, I just randomly got an e-mail from their promoter a couple years back, where she hooked me up with the band’s 2009 release Metazoa. I was duly impressed by what these coasties had to offer, so when I saw that these guys had a new record coming out, I definitely reached out to get a promo of it. And I’m happy that I did, though I think that Dwellings is a different beast from Metazoa. Bad? Definitely not. But did the band grow and get a lot better? It seems like the maintained a pretty even keel during the two years away.
Slough Feg (formerly The Lord Weird Slough Feg) have always existed in their own little musical bubble (technically called a “sloubble”). Inside their little sloubble, they remain happily oblivious to musical styles, trends and changing tastes in metal. To them it’s always sometime between 1978 and 1983, where their odd amalgam of NWOBHM, Thin Lizzy and Celtic folk/pub rock would seem timely and current. Here on album eight The Animal Spirits, the sloubble remains intact as Slough Feg churns out more of their unique, oddball proto-metal for a small but loyal cult following. If you’ve followed this San Francisco based unit, you know what to expect. If not, well, it’s strange but fun and truly a love or hate type proposition.
Neal Kay, for those who don’t know, is widely credited with discovering and championing Iron Maiden way back in the day. Well, if that wasn’t service enough to the metal world, now he has helped bring us Northern Ireland’s classic metal masters Stormzone and their new album Death Dealer. This is no small accomplishment because, quite simply, this album is an absolute masterpiece of classic metal and full to the brim with top quality metal anthems. Stormzone is a band deeply entrenched in the early NWOBHM style and composed of musicians like vocalist John “Harv” Harbinson, with ties to bands of that era (Sweet Savage, Fastway). All the trappings of the British metal invasion are here and fans of that sound and seminal masters like of Saxon and Grim Reaper will immediately hear it in the sound and attitude exhibited on Death Dealer.
Steelwing? Never heard of them. I toss in Lord of the Wasteland to see what I am dealing with and POW!! I get punched right in the face by an angry, metal spiked fist from 1982! This Stockholm, Sweden based band may be young and only formed in 2009, but man can they bring the pure, unadulterated NWOBHM power to the party. On this, their debut album, they shamelessly steal the best recipes from Iron Maiden, Saxon, Grim Reaper and Warlord and cook up a surprisingly fresh sounding, if utterly unoriginal metal meatloaf of riffs and attitude with enough cheese coating to choke a mastodon. Steelwing gives you eight fast and furious traditional metal anthems played by musicians who clearly worship at the altar of early 80’s metal and know exactly how that epoch of metal should sound.
There is an interesting irony to throwback bands like White Wizzard and a lot of the other thrash throwbacks that are coming out right now, which is that at one point in time what these guys were doing was forward thinking. I know it’s hard to believe, in a world where metal is used to support stupid ideologies, backwards thinking or just generally brutish and retarded behavior, it’s hard to think of metal as progressive, but in 1980, metal was outside of the box. Bands like Iron Maiden and Def Leppard were just cutting their teeth, Lars Ulrich was busy stealing their riffs and ideas and heavy metal was fresh, young, innovative and above all rebellious and really, really interesting.
