The Kandidate wasn’t what I was expecting. Like a mix of thrash metal and Agnostic Front, these Danish metallers have produced an album to which I am utterly blase. As Angry Metal Guy, it is my job to have really strong opinions about things one way or another, but instead I listen to this album and I just.. don’t hear much that I want to come back to. On the other hand there’s not much to dis. It’s just an all-in-all mediocre record by a band I’ve never heard before.
“Overkill is still around?” That was my first thought when I received this promo. See, this band is definitely a part of my childhood, being a huge a fan of the record I Hear Black when I was at the tender age of 11, but they were never a band that I ever followed with any religiosity. No, Overkill never managed to make it into my early thrash pantheon, despite the fact that I remember loving that album. So it was with great interest that I put on this album, not really know what to expect at all given everything. I mean, it’s been a lot of years and bands, in general, do not age well. And, after asking around, I’d heard that Overkill hadn’t aged very well, either.
Charred Walls of the Damned has two distinct honors from the get-go: not only is it the longest band name EVER, but it’s also the first thing in which excellent drummer Richard Christy has surfaced in since going to the Howard Stern show and leaving American power metallers Iced Earth in the dust. I think everyone was wondering when he was going to jump back into metal, myself included. It’s hard to imagine that the former Death and Iced Earth drummer was just going to leave everything behind. Given his background it was only a matter of time. And not just his background: homeboy has contacts, too! He brings with him the mighty Jason Suecof, mostly known for his production (Trivium, Luna Mortis, God Forbid and so on), but who is also a fucking wicked ass guitar player (seriously, dude can shred). On bass, of course, is the mighty Steve DiGiorgio who played with Christy in Iced Earth and Death. How can this project possibly lose?
Troll is the side project of former Dimmu Borgir bassist current The Kovenant vocalist Nagash (aka Lex Icon), but it also has the honor of being the first project he was ever involved with at the very young age of about 14. However, after the band fell apart it soon became his solo project and has gone through some various incarnations over the year. If one were to give Neo-Satanic Supremacy a cold listen, one would not every know that a major transformation had taken place in the band’s history. No, instead one would assume that Nagash had quit Dimmu Borgir to produce this very record. Because, well, frankly it sounds like the band circa 1998.
An unfortunate side-effect of not being omniscient is that I have not listened to the back catalogues of every band that I receive promos for. Sometimes this results in a large amount of unnecessary griping from fanboys on forums, and sometimes this means that I’m taken completely by surprise by an album that might not be as good as a band’s earlier work, but as it’s the first thing I’ve heard I can laud it as an amazing album. Of course, this leaves a listener in an odd place, as one has nothing to compare the music with or a style-reference. I feel like I’m wandering in pretty blind with the band Dark Fortress who has a new album called Ylem on the way (or out, depending on when you’re reading this), as the band has been around in the German scene since 1994, that’s 16 years of releases that I’ve never heard.
Step over, Manowar, the new Kings of Metal are in town. Sure, they’ve been around for a while, and they’re a little more tongue in cheek than Manowar is, but Dream Evil, with the release of their new record In the Night, have risen from the ashes (of a DVD release?) to take the crown for themselves in their mighty, viking fists! These Swedes have put forth a strong offering filled with skull-crushing riffs, ball-grabbing vocals and unabashedly cheesy-as-hell lyrics, that would make Snowy Shaw blush, in order to try to re-gain the glory of their mighty album The Book of Heavy Metal.
Six Feet Under is back with the third installment in their Graveyard Classics series, and fortunately for us, this time they’re not covering AC/DC songs. I suspect that the majority of you either know what these things are about, have heard them, or just don’t care at all so I’m not going to spend tons of time on this, but Graveyard Classics 3 is a cover record from the groove oriented death metal band Six Feet Under. Barnes and crew have, this time around, elected a bunch of their favorite tracks from before they were in bands and have warped them into death rock tracks. The result being sort of cartoonish and silly: but mildly enjoyable at the same time.
Early in my tenure in 2009 I received a record that was being re-released by Metal Blade: Valkyrja’s Invocation of Demise, which was a release of an earlier record that was initially released in 2007 on Northern Silence Productions. There were several substantive complaints that I had about the record, which can be summed up as follows: there is nothing new and/or interesting here; it is repetitive and boring; the songs are hyper simplistic and despite being fast, don’t feel terribly heavy. The challenge, then, for Valkyrja to produce a record that I review better is to improve on these things (and since Valkyrja is out to prove themselves to me and me alone, they certainly will try… *cough*) with their new release Contamination.
Easily one of the most anticipated records of 2010 for me has been Ihsahn’s new offering. While I was a passing Emperor fan, really just a fan of In the Nightside Eclipse and Anthems to the Welkin at Dusk-era, I was taken by Ihsahn’s solo stuff. The Adversary felt fresh, progressive enough, a step away from the later Emperor material of which I wasn’t a fan, and it captured the sonic styles and textures that he was never quite allowed to explore while in Emperor. The record didn’t stick with me as I had hoped, while I listened to it occasionally it didn’t hold a steadfast position in my discography. On the other hand, angL blew me away. Probably the finest record of 2008, angL has maintained a steady place in the rotation and is a record that I’ve showed to dozens of people. Perfectly produced, perfectly composed and smartly written, angL contained everything that I wanted out of a new progressive metal record. So, of course, when I heard that Ihsahn would be releasing a new record in 2010, I became justifiably excited.
Every once in a while a record just jumps out at you and kicks your ass every which way. The originality, the brutality, everything that you want from death metal just hits you right in the face and leaves you dazed, but pleased. The Reign of Darkness, the sophomore release of UK death metallers (or deathcorers if you read the interwebs, though I’m inclined to just call this death metal) is not one of those records. And while it can be very difficult to write about just how good a band is or how bad a band is, I find the most difficult reviews to write the ones where you have to say “I don’t like it, but you might if this is your thing.”
