Skid Row "United World Rebellion: Chapter One" Review

Skid Row seem to have one of the most fan dumb filled fan bases out there. You've got the fans who keep insisting that the band should reunite with Bach (despite the fact that Bach barely wrote anything while he was in the band, has his own solo career (if, admittedly, a not especially prolific one), was a HUGE egotist when he was in the band, the fact that his replacement has now been in the band longer than he has, the fact that Bach himself has said he doesn't want to do it (albeit not quite in those words) and Bach's voice has gone downhill since he left the band. Also, Rachel Bolan apparently won't let it happen, although I can't say I don't blame him when you consider those factors I've just mentioned, as a bad reunion show is still a bad show at the end of the day...), you've got the fans who act like Skid Row's change in sound has automatically made them bad (despite the fact that Subhuman Race (which also had Bach on vocals) was a stylistic change from the first two albums and, if you wanted to be technical, even their second album itself was a stylistic change from their first album), you've got the fans who just want the guys to return to their glam metal sound (despite...actually, that is kind of a reasonable complaint, since glam metal's been making a comeback in Europe since the 2000's started, although I think it's still underground enough in America that making a major return to the sound of their debut would be a very risky idea) and you've got the fans who think all of the other guys are being horribly unfair to the band and should just stop following the band if all they have to do is complaint (despite the fact that, sometimes, the other guys might actually have a fair point...although, in this case, it seems to be once in a blue moon when that does happen!).

I'm in the last category. I get that the other guys have some valid complaints, but, at the end of the day, Skid Row did what they needed to in order to survive. I can't really blame them for that. Honestly, I think that poor Johnny Solinger is being let down by the band when it comes to studio material (I've not seen the band live, so it might well be a very different story there...), as his two full length albums with him featured next to no music contributions from him (one co-writing credit on Thickskin (specifically on "Mouth Of Voodoo") and none of Revolutions Per Minute...and none on here either, now I think on it!), so he's only as good as the music he has to sing. Let me put it to you this way: if we assume that the same albums were released with Bach on vocals, they'd probably still be albums that are disliked because they simply aren't strong records. Cut the guy some slack in that regard, at least: it's not really his fault that those albums were released while Rachel Bolan and Dave Sabo weren't producing their best material!

*Cough* Anyway...

Most people will probably have heard of Skid Row for their ballads from their debut album, "18 And Life" and "I Remember You", but the guys have been around since 1986 and, aside from what was technically a break up between 1996 and 1999 (the band never officially broke up, but they didn't have a vocalist in between that period of time and most of the members were in another band named Ozone Monday during that time), have been stubbornly going on to this day, albeit with an ability to release studio albums at a rate that Boston would be impressed with (if you want to count this EP as their first album since their last one, it's taken seven years to get to this album...). You could feasibly order all of their studio albums and this EP for about £25-£30, if you shopped around a bit, although most people would probably recommend you only get their debut and Slave To The Grind. Which is fair enough, as those ARE very good records if you like glam metal and don't mind the fact that they got noticeably heavier for Slave To The Grind... (although, saying that, heavier does not mean they went into extreme metal territory, so don't expect that to mean they suddenly tried to outdo Slayer or Death in terms of heaviness!)

For those who want something resembling a detailed history of the band, Skid Row were formed in New Jersey in 1986 by guitarist Dave Sabo and bassist Rachel Bolan (incidentally, two of the three original line up members still in the band today). The band added their first full line up of drummer Rob Affuso, guitarist Scotti Hill and vocalist Matt Fallon (who had also recently left Anthrax, having joined as Neil Turbin's replacement and even did some recording towards Spreading The Disease before he left the band and was replaced with Joey Belladonna). Yes, Skid Row fans, you read that right: Bach was NOT the first vocalist Skid Row had. Matt was replaced fairly quickly by Bach and the band did some touring before getting signed (thanks in part to Sabo's friendship with Jon Bon Jovi) and releasing their self-titled debut album in January 1989. This sold rather well, going platinum five times in the US alone. The same line up later returned to the studio and released Slave To The Grind in June 1991. It didn't sell quite as well, only going double platinum in the US, but the fact the album was noticeably darker than the band's debut was may have had something to do with this. After a hiatus during 1993, the band would return to the studio (again, with the same line up) to record Subhuman Race, which was released in March 1995. Although it charted well in a few countries, it doesn't appear to have sold enough to have become a platinum selling release, probably due in part to receiving very little promotion on MTV due to the music landscape basically having shifted and decreed that all bands connected to hair metal had to be ignored and hated with a burning passion while the next big thing (grunge) was around. Bach was finally fired from the band in late 1996 after an argument with Rachel Bolan about opening for Kiss on New Year's Eve 1996. The band then faded away for a bit and did their project I mentioned earlier, Ozone Monday, during which time Rob Affuso left the band and was replaced by Charlie Mills. In 1999, the band returned with Johnny Solinger on vocals and started what seems to be an unofficial tradition that every studio album needs to have a different drummer, as Charlie Mills left and was replaced by ex-Saigon Kick drummer Phil Varone. The band would release their fourth album, Thickskin, in August 2003, got Dave Gara as their new drummer in 2004 and would then go on to release Revolutions Per Minute in October 2006. The band's line up was stable until April 2010, when Dave Gara left the band and was replaced by Rob Hammersmith, who is still in the band to this day. And...we now come to as close to the present day as we can be.

2013 saw the band returning after 2006's..."controversial" might not be the best word to describe Revolutions Per Minute. Critically, it's received mixed to negative reviews (although I have seen a few somewhat positive ones out there), but the general fan reaction appears to be best summed up as "BURN, YOU FUCKER!" Honestly, I'm with the critics on this one: musically, it's not what Skid Row did on their first two albums, but I wouldn't say it's outright bad either, as it does have a couple of tracks that are enjoyable in their own right and I wouldn't say it descends to the point where I'd feel justified in getting angry at the record like Boston's Life, Love & Hope did. It's not really a record that those who only enjoy metal music are going to love, as it's got a very noticeable punk influence (which can also be seen on Slave To The Grind: "Riot Act", anyone?) and tries a few different styles of music than Skid Row have done before now. Granted, most of the experiments don't really pay off, but you get the point I'm making: Revolutions Per Minute's bad reputation, at least to me, feels a little bit extreme.

...Wait, I'm supposed to be talking about their EP from last year.

United World Rebellion: Chapter One is the first in a series of EPs (as the title may have tipped you off about) that Skid Row are going to be releasing. The marketing for the EP indicates that they're going to be making three of these EPs, although it also said they would be being released over a 12 to 18 month period, so I guess that turned out to be a bit of a lie, as we're now 12 months after the release of this EP and I've seen no info about when the second EP is going to be released (although some rumours indicate that it might be coming in June), let alone the third! So I guess you could technically argue that the EPs constitute Solinger's third album with the band, as the overall combined run time of the three EPs is likely to end up giving us about an hour's worth of music once they're all finally out!

So, what do we get from this EP? Five songs...and not all good ones, either. Yes, while other bands used 2013 as an excuse to put out two albums that ultimately proved to be a wonderful example of why double albums aren't as easy to do as you'd think they are *cough*FiveFingerDeathPunch*cough*, Skid Row used the opportunity to fail to make an EP full of all killer material.

First, let's start with the positives. If you wanted the band to return to their early sound, you'll be happy to hear that this is about the closest they've come to it since Subhuman Race. You could feasibly pretend that the band didn't release anything for about 22 year after Slave To The Grind and, at least from a musical perspective, not be too far from the mark. Johnny Solinger has also made some noticeable improvements to his singing since he joined the band, as his vocals on "Kings Of Demolition" will bring to mind Bach's voice more than you'd expect (if admittedly, still though a noticeable punk filter and without the vocal acrobatics that made Bach so well beloved). On a performance level, everyone delivered: I wouldn't say there were any performances where I would have gone "Hang it up, dude, you ain't up to doing this any more". Nobody really struck me as doing anything exception, but I guess you can give them a bit of a free pass on that front, as you don't really expect a guitar solo out of the Joe Satriani school of soloing in glam metal and Skid Row have always had a bit of a punk undertone to their music (again, "Riot Act", anyone?). Of the songs, "Kings Of Demolition" and "Stitches" are pretty good! Not flawless by any measure, but certainly are worth hearing if you wrote off Skid Row due to Bach not being in the band.

The problems start piling up after "Kings Of Demolition" (and even that wasn't exactly a flawless song: the lyrics could have done with a bit of work). "Let Go" is definitely a solid track, but the lyrics have gone NOTICEABLY downhill on this song. "This Is Killing Me" has probably Solinger's best attempt at performing a ballad that I can think of, but that doesn't necessarily make it good: his voice still doesn't seem to quite suit doing ballads properly. The fact that the opening guitar part is very reminiscent of that from "I Remember You" doesn't help much. All told, it's not exactly a bad song, but I wouldn't exactly say this is a song that a lot of people are going to want to listen to a lot of times. Which is very disappointing, as their ballads on their debut are all brilliant! "Get Up" is a step up from "This Is Killing Me", but still seems to be at about the same level as "Let Go" musically. I will say that Solinger does do a bit of a Bach influenced vocal acrobatic in this song that is worth hearing, but this song probably won't be a highlight for most people and definitely takes a bit too long to finally fade out.

So, with two tracks that are definitely worth a listen, two that are at least solid tracks and one that probably could have improved the EP by being cut, that's not really a bad track record, is it? Unfortunately, part of the thing that drags this down is that, on an EP, you can't afford to release a single bad song, as you've got less solid stuff to drown out the bad stuff. Heck, you can't even have a song that just leaves your audience going "Meh", as that's usually going to result in the song being skipped. While I will say that, track for track, it's the best record Skid Row have done with Solinger on vocals, that's really not saying a lot, as it's still only five tracks compared to Thickskin's twelve and Revolutions Per Minute's eleven!

On a production level, I think the album is maybe a bit on the loud side, but is otherwise OK. The bass doesn't require you to develop psychic abilities to be able to follow it, the guitars have some punch to them, the drums are pretty good and Solinger, while maybe a bit too quiet at points, is still OK in the mix. All told, pretty good!

So, my final conclusion? It's a fairly good EP that lets itself down by having too many songs which aren't really worth checking out. If you've not bothered with Skid Row after Bach left the band, this probably won't completely win you over, but it's worth picking up, as it's their best release with Solinger to date. For those who aren't Skid Row fans, though, I'd recommend getting their debut album and Slave To The Grind instead of this.

Final Rating: 6 Out Of 10

Skid Row are crawling towards making their first strong release with Solinger, but more work still needs to be done before they can start to win over the "No Bach, no Skid Row" crowd.

Personal Favourite Song: "Kings Of Demolition"

Bands Reuniting & Why I Always Get Concerned By It

A lot of people who were around in the 80's will have long lists of bands which they saw as a teenager or young adult who they wish would just come back, even if only for one show. And, in this day and age, a lot of bands are making reunions. To pick the example that springs to mind at the minute, we now have something that could fairly be considered a reunion by Dark Angel.

So, you'd expect me to be happy with all of these developments, right? Well...not really, no. Don't get me wrong, it's great to see the old legends suddenly coming back and giving the dose of old school metal that a lot of people in my age group don't really have today, but I cannot help thinking that most of the reunions are doing nothing more than proving why so many older metal fans won't acknowledge that it's no longer the 80's and that they need to let the past remain the past, as well as doing little to dispel the suspicion that many of the bands are just doing it to cash in on their legacies, as they could feasibly put on what would have been an underwhelming show when the members were young and full of venom and be hailed as having made a great return to form.

...I see a lot of people have already grabbed their pitchforks and torches. So, let's make a deal: I'll say what I want to say and then, after I've done that, you can continue to mob me to death. That seems reasonable?

Let's start by considering how age affects people. Let's be honest, people change as they get older (...well, most of them do!) and this is no exception to their abilities on their respective instruments: even the greatest guitar shredders in the world will probably struggle to play what they could manage with ease when they were twenty. This means that there will almost inevitably be some deterioration of the abilities of the members, even if they've kept in practice with the instruments over the course of their hiatus by, for example, being in other bands. This hits vocalists worse than people playing instruments, as most people's voices get lower over the course of time. This can often mean that a band simply can't perform up to the standards they're being measured up against. Short of a reunion in name only, there's no real way to get a band to reunite and have them turn out to be up to their old standards. While a lot of fans will voluntarily acknowledge this fact, the question is WHY we are letting bands come out onto the stage who simply aren't up to their standards, as lofty as they are. Because nostalgia is a powerful thing, of course: we want them to come out and give us a good show because we know they have a good reputation. When we get that, we're happy. Whether it would have been a good show back in the day doesn't factor into the equation for a lot of people: they just want a good show in general.

The second point is that most reunions usually have to start for a reason: you don't tend to get people who've not seen each other for a decade to suddenly go "Yeah, let's reunite our old band again" upon meeting up, especially if the band broke up due to bad blood between the members and they've not seen each other for most of that time. Which means that there is usually an incentive beyond the music itself. That's not to say that every reunion has been done due to there being an incentive (some bands are bound to have returned because they genuinely wanted to), but there's usually something that will have made the idea of a reunion turn from "Never going to happen" to "Hmm...we're thinking about it". Some bands will have done it for the fans, some will have done it for the money, some will have done it because their other projects aren't working out...you get the point, I'm sure! As much as we'd all like to think that bands have come back because fan demand has been so high that the band have suddenly gone "Our fans still haven't forgotten us! Guys, you feel like doing some shows to thank them for their loyalty?", the sad truth is that, unless demand is high enough to make the reunion truly worthwhile, most bands probably aren't too concerned about having a reunion unless they're harassed about so much that they can't ignore it. So, if a really small band breaks up, you can probably be confident that they'll never reunite in a million years, while a large band that breaks up will inevitably receive so many reunion requests that members of the band will have talks about it at least once every few years, if not months. Requests for classic line up reunions for bands that don't currently have them will also occur, and nearly always will involve a lot of money being thrown at the band until it happens. As you may have noticed, the actual reasons WHY the band aren't reuniting aren't considered by those who want them to return: they just throw larger sums of  money at the band in the hopes that it will do something. Of course, the original reasons for a reunion CAN turn into an honest attempt to give the fans what they want and have the members of the band wondering why they broke up in the first place, so that doesn't mean that a reunion is completely a bad thing in and of itself once it gets going, but the reasons that got it started usually don't tend to involve the guys just going "Yeah, let's reunite", especially if they now have lives outside of music that they can't just give up to put the band back together.

The third thing is that a reunion often has a set of expectations attached to it by the fans and, depending on how long the band has been away for, the standards the band has to live up simply cannot be met, even if the band could perform up to the standards that they held in their prime. If a band has been away for at least a decade, you can expect expectations for their reunion to be sky high and, if the band don't meet up to them, you'll often find fans picking the reunited band apart for flaws that should have been obvious to anyone who had been paying attention to other projects by the members (assuming they have any). As an example that springs to mind, a lot of people don't like Sanctuary's return due to Warrel Dane not being able to pull off some of the band's classics any more. However, if you'd been following Nevermore's career after Sanctuary broke up, you'd have known that Dane had been dialling down the falsetto screams for a good while since the band had been around, which should have been taken as a sign that he couldn't do them as well as he used to be able to. In that aspect, it's hard to feel sympathy for the Sanctuary fans acting like Dane's ruining the reunion through not being up to the high standards he set for himself on Sanctuary's debut, as he was both about twenty five years younger on that album AND he's been around with another band for long enough that it's really their fault for not noticing the warning bell that should have been going off in their heads (also, his voice sounds VERY different now compared to that album, so what were you expecting, the guy to suddenly do his old Rob Halford impression?). That said, I'll admit that I'd really be interested in seeing what Sanctuary's next album will sound like, so I can't deny that I'm somewhat caught up in some degree of hype regarding them in the studio! Live, though...well, there's a reason why I'd like to see a Nevermore reunion after this album is released and not see Sanctuary continue, even if the next Sanctuary album turns out to be brilliant!

The fourth issue is whenever a new album is going to be made by a reuniting act. Let's be honest, this should have EVERYONE worried when it's announced, especially if the band's been apart for over a decade. People change and what might have been an amazing idea when you're twenty might look rather dumb when you're thirty, so you can usually expect a reunion album to fail to match the high standards that fans will place on it. That doesn't mean there haven't been good reunion albums, of course, but most of them usually tend to be rather safe albums, as the band is in a position where it needs to regain support from the old fans, but can't afford to do something too drastic for fear of people saying stuff like "They shouldn't have reunited if they can't deliver a good album". This leaves a tricky balancing act to try to play: write enough material that is recognisably in their old style to impress the old fans, but throw in some experimental stuff to suit where the band are now to prevent accusations of retreading on past glories. The end result is usually a good, if unexceptional, album that gets hyped through the roof just because it's not as bad as people feared it would be. And that, to me, feels like rewarding mediocrity, as we're basically going "Well, it didn't suck, so it's good!" THIS DOES NOT MEAN BANDS CANNOT PULL OFF STRONG REUNION ALBUMS! Some bands have done it, but most have not done it after over a decade of not doing anything. In those cases, expectations usually are on the level of expecting a godlike album from a rusty band who likely is still trying to pull itself together again to see whether it still functions properly. It's like asking Robocop to hunt down a crime lord when you've only just reactivated him after over a hundred years of him falling apart in a garage: you know that they're out of their depth, but you're still expecting them to do what came naturally to them while they are getting used to culture shock, rust and things not working the way they used to. When put like that, a bit unreasonable, isn't it?

The last issue is that, well, sometimes memories are best left as just that: memories. With all that I've said in the last four paragraphs, it's fair to say that, sometimes, leaving the book closed is honestly the best idea for a band if they want to protect their legacy. There's nothing stopping the members from doing the songs live (and I'm sure an agreement could be drawn up if necessary to allow all of the members to do that if they wanted to with their projects), so there's often little point in a reunion unless the band had made a rule basically saying "You can't play any of our songs if you aren't in the band". Yes, it's nice to see the old guys get on stage and give it a go, but, really, do you want to do that if they can't deliver the material any more? Would you not prefer to hear someone do the song properly, even if it's not with all of the guys in the band performing it?

Think about that...

You may now continue organising the lynch mob if you want to.

(Also, a funny meta fact for my readers: after writing this article, I sent this article off to a friend who is my unofficial second opinion provider/proofreader/quality assurance guy and, after he read it, he mentioned that what I'd brought up was basically what happened with him when Black Sabbath announced their reunion. I would like it to be known that Black Sabbath genuinely did not cross my mind while writing this article and it was only when he mentioned them that I realised that what I'd said could apply to them for all of my comments. When I was writing this, the only bands that crossed my mind for definite were Dark Angel, Death Angel and Sanctuary. Goes to show, though: sometimes, it takes a second pair of eyes to realise just how much you managed to hit the mark!)

Ozzy Osbourne "The Ultimate Sin" Review

Anyone who has even a passing knowledge of heavy metal will have heard of Ozzy Osbourne. You'll have heard of him for being the frontman of Black Sabbath, you'll have heard of him for his solo career, you'll have heard of him for appearing on a reality TV show, you'll have heard of him for founding Ozzfest, you'll have heard of him for covering "Changes" with his daughter or you'll have heard of him for some of the hilariously daft things he's done over the course of his life, like biting the head off of a bat, smoking a line of ants and urinating on the Alamo memorial while drunk and dressed in his wife's clothes

...Yes, that last one actually happened. I still don't know what's funnier about that incident, the fact that he did it at all or the fact that the only reason he was wearing Sharon Osbourne's clothes at the time was because she thought hiding his clothes would stop him from leaving the house. Honestly, I'd have thought Ozzy would have just gone out naked.

But we're not here to laugh at some of the daft things Ozzy has done over the course of his life (...well, I'm not!). We're here to talk about his fourth solo album, The Ultimate Sin, released in 1986. This album has had a rather weird history, to put it politely, coming out after Bark At The Moon (which you're bound to know for the title track at minimum) and having a rather more noticeable glam metal influence. This was the same year that Bon Jovi's Slippery When Wet was released, along with Poison's Look What The Cat Dragged In and Stryper's To Hell With The Devil, so it's fair to say that glam metal was rather popular around then (heck, even Judas Priest gave it a go on Turbo, with...well, "mixed results" seems to be the polite way to put it). At the time it was released, the album was the highest charting album of Ozzy's career and was later remastered in 1995, putting the album on CD for the first time. Since then, however, the album (along with a few other albums) has been deleted from Ozzy's discography, allegedly due to a dispute between Ozzy and bassist for the album Phil Soussan over the song "Shot In The Dark", although you can now get the deleted albums on iTunes. The album, however, has not been reissued or remastered at all since then. So, if you are the kind of person who likes having physical copies of albums, you might need to shop around a bit to be sure of getting a copy for this album. I personally got rather lucky, as I found this album being sold for about £4 in a record shop. Was it worth getting for that price? Well, let's find out.

The big thing you'll notice is that this album is definitely taking more than a few cues from the glam metal scene. Now, to be fair, Ozzy had always had a bit of a lean towards being part of the mainstream metal scene (Blizzard Of Ozz isn't exactly what you'd expect Iron Maiden to produce, is what I'm saying), but this is a more noticeable lean towards mainstream metal. The big problem, as you might be able to guess from that thought alone, is that Ozzy's voice doesn't really suit the sound properly. It's not the worst example out there, but glam metal generally has a focus on being fun to listen to and Ozzy's voice doesn't have the right tone to match up with that aesthetic. This isn't album breaking by any measure, considering the music is a slightly darker take on the genre (not to the extent of W.A.S.P., but definitely darker than Poison and Bon Jovi did) and avoids the typical topics for glam, but glam fanatics will be right to say that Ozzy doesn't suit the album's sound properly.

That said, his voice is in fairly good shape on this album when you consider that he must have been 37 when the album was being recorded and then factor in everything he put his voice and body through while he was in Black Sabbath and was part of his solo band. I would say it's his best performance on an album to date, but I'm honestly not as familiar with Ozzy's solo stuff as I really should be, so I can't confirm how accurate that statement is. I do think he sings better here than he did with Black Sabbath, though! Jake E. Lee has the unfortunate reputation of being the guy who happened to be playing for Ozzy between Randy Rhodes and Zakk Wylde, but he's a good guitarist in his own right. It's really a shame that his work with Ozzy is about the only thing he's really known for, so I'm hoping that his new gig (Red Dragon Cartel) ends up working out for him, even if it isn't likely to make him a big name anymore...in fact, I'm going to be REALLY generous to the guy and do a tiny bit of promotion of the band. Here's the official videos connected to the band, go check them out! I'll still be here when you're done!

"Deceived" by Red Dragon Cartel

"Feeder" by Red Dragon Cartel

"Shout It Out" by Red Dragon Cartel

...You heard them all? Good! Anyway, moving back to the review. Phil Soussan is a solid bassist and his contribution to the album (co-writing "Shot In The Dark" with Lee) shows that the guy was a really solid songwriter. I'm sadly not really familiar with his work outside of this album, but I've taken a quick glance at his work and I'm surprised to notice that his last studio appearances appear to have been in 1997. In fact, his appearance on The Ultimate Sin was apparently his first appearance on any album at all, which is really quite surprising: the guy was replacing Bob Daisley, who'd been in Ozzy's solo band pretty much from the start (and who actually ended up replacing Soussan after the tour for this album), and actually did a pretty good job at it. Randy Castillo also makes his first appearance on an Ozzy Osbourne album here, but you'd honestly be forgiven for not noticing him, as he doesn't really shine much on this album. He's good at what he does, but he doesn't really do a lot more than that. Admittedly, this is pretty much true for most drummers in glam metal, so you could fairly blame the material on the album for making the poor guy so unnoticeable.

So, now I've talked about the musicians, how does the material stand up? Well, it's a bit of a mixed bag, with some songs being flat out unmemorable, some songs that you'll recognise when you hear them and some which will stick with you for a good while! The songs which have the strong hooks, though, are definitely worth hearing! Take "Shot In The Dark": it's probably one of the best songs on an Ozzy Osbourne album and is certainly up there with "Crazy Train" and "Mr. Crowley" as a song which every Ozzy fan should know! The title track is very solid, although I do have to point out that the verses to it appear to have had their melody line borrowed by Five Finger Death Punch to form the melody line for their song "Lift Me Up"...don't believe me? Give both songs a listen right now! Might as well, I'm near the end of my definite praise for the album anyway...

"The Ultimate Sin" by Ozzy Osbourne

"Lift Me Up" by Five Finger Death Punch

...Incidentally, I do like "Lift Me Up", before people start to draw upon their anger at Five Finger Death Punch. It's not a flawless song, but it's at least enjoyable to throw on when I'm feeling particularly pissed off and it's still pretty catchy. Anyway, moving back to the review.

"Secret Loser" is also fairly catchy, if definitely very glam influenced. After that is when things start getting unmemorable, if unoffencive. Most of the guitar work is flat out brilliant on the album, but the hooks just aren't there to transform everything into a solid song, which means that you'll usually have forgotten what you were listening to once you've put on the next track on the album. The least memorable song is "Never", which is a shame as it has a brilliant opening riff. Unfortunately, the song just doesn't stick with you and, considering you'll probably be confusing the song for "Never Know Why" whenever you try to remember it, it might have been kinder to cut this song, or at least give it a different title to help minimise confusion! The same happens with "Fool Like You", only without capable of being mistaken for "Never Know Why". I also would have to say that "Killer Of Giants" takes too long to get to the interesting part, although it's pretty good when it finally gets there. The rest of the album is a bit more memorable, but it's rare that you'll be able to remember more than the guitar riff and most of the chorus to the song in question.

So, after all of that, how does the production stand up? Well, I've got the 1995 remaster of the album, so I can't say how the album sounds compares to the original version of the album, but I think that the big issue is, surprisingly, not the bass being too quietly mixed (it's actually placed pretty nicely in the mix: not so quiet that you can't hear it, but not so loud that it becomes particularly distracting), but Ozzy's voice. It's just a bit too loud for my liking. I also think that Lee is maybe a bit on the quiet side quite a few times on the album, but that's probably a bit of a nitpick, as he commands your attention when he needs to. Other than that, I have to say that the production is perfectly fine. It could have done with a tiny bit more volume, but, since the remaster pre-dates the time when the loudness war really started to push what was acceptable, I can't complain about that on too much. Honestly, if albums sounded more like this instead of how they do today, I'd probably be a lot happier to listen to some of the albums I have, as some of them are just uncomfortable for me to listen to for too much time. Maybe I'm getting old or more elitist about album production, but I'd prefer to not feel like I need to change my ears after a few hours of listening to music...

Well, it's a solidly performed album with production values which are still pretty good (if a bit on a quiet side) compared to today's standards, but which suffers from having a lot of material that isn't as memorable as it should be. Does it deserve the hatred it gets from the Ozzy fans who insist that it's Ozzy's worst album? Hmm...if this is his worst album, then I have to ask what their definition of "bad" is, since I found this to be a fairly enjoyable listen in spite of the songs that were lacking memorable moments. Is it worth seeking out if you've never heard of Ozzy before now? No, it isn't: I'd recommend going for Blizzard Of Ozz instead (and try to make sure you get the remaster with the original bass and drum tracks!). However, if you aren't opposed to 80's mainstream metal, this is worth at least a listen. You'll probably never call this one of your favourite albums, but it's certainly not as bad as you'd expect it to be from the reputation it has among fans of Ozzy's solo work.

Final Rating: 6 Out Of 10

The album contains enough misfires to not really make it worth owning a copy of, but it's certainly an enjoyable listen. If you can find a fairly cheap copy of the album and like 80's mainstream metal, you could do far worse than picking this up.

Personal Favourite Tracks: "The Ultimate Sin", "Secret Loser", "Spark In The Dark"

Hypocrisy In The Metal Scene + Why Metallica Should Not Be The Only Metal Band Condemned For Selling Out

I've been chatting on a forum recently in a section regarding controversial music opinions people have and, while I was there, I chatted with someone who brought up an interesting point when I mentioned my feeling that a lot of thrash classics were overrated. I will not include the entire comment, but the interesting part (which I was given permission to repost here) is as follows:

People usually say they prefer Megadeth over Metallica because of Megadeth being more "consistent" (shit, even Rob Halford said this!), but if you listen to Megadeth's '90s stuff, it's as similar to Metallica's departure. Metallica had Black Album - St Anger; Megadeth had Countdown - World Needs a Hero. Hell, all 4 bands had albums that nearly alienated their fanbases (Slayer had Diabolus in Musica, Metallica had St Anger, Anthrax had Stomp 442, and Megadeth had Risk.)

I guess my unpopular opinion there is that Metallica wasn't the only one that tried to alienate their existing fanbase. All of the "big 4" bands went through a time in the '90s - early 2000s when they went through significant changes in their sound.

It was only when I really sat and thought about it that I realised he had a very fair point. Like it or not, all of the members of the big 4 of thrash metal have released albums that challenged their relationships with fans and aimed to appeal towards the mainstream. With Megadeth, it was Risk that was undeniably the furtherest the band had gone from their thrash metal roots, although you could fairly argue that everything after Rust In Piece up until Risk was an increasingly greater attempt to appeal towards the mainstream if you wanted to. With Slayer, we have the somewhat experimental Diabolus In Musica and (if you want to count it as a proper studio album) the punk covers album Undisputed Attitude which caused a bit of a divide among metal fans. And with Anthrax, we have most of the John Bush era of the band, which caused more of an aim towards grunge and alternative metal (if not groove metal). Yet none of these bands get the same level of flack as Metallica do.

Granted, there are reasons I have neglected to mention so far: first of all, Metallica slowed down their work rate on albums to a rather sluggish rate (five years between the self-titled and Load, five years between Reload and St Anger and five years between St Anger and Death Magnetic), meaning that it's easier to get more annoyed at the band for taking their time to release albums. Secondly, they are one of the most high profile metal bands out there and only really gained that status thanks in part to the impressive sales of the self-titled album, so it's perfectly possible to get sick of seeing them all of the time. Thirdly, Metallica made some...rather questionable decisions in the 90's and early 00's, to put it politely (and I refuse to talk about Lulu for any reason!). All of these do make it easier to want to deal a blow against the band. But it gets ridiculous when you realise that Metallica are often receiving HUGE amounts of hatred for stuff that, if you took out the overblown hatred (and, admittedly, the overblown hype), would actually be really cool. Take their gig in Antarctica: when I heard about that, I will admit I thought it was a somewhat daft idea at first! But, once I thought about it, it struck me as a really cool idea! Some comments I found about it, though, would have had you convinced that some people had come to that bit of news just to make the obvious digs against the band instead of actually talking about the news itself (including the ever popular "Don't care, this band has released nothing worth listening to in over 20 years" from quite a few people...which invites the question of why they bother to read news about Metallica if they don't care about the band and just want to make comments about the quality of their material, but hey, this is logic we're talking about here, a thing which seems to disappear very quickly upon the internet...).

This gets worse when you realise the hypocrisy that I've implied earlier: a lot of the time, Metallica are being given flack for stuff that a lot of other bands have attempted and only returned to their more loved sound after their attempt at mainstream success failed. To highlight the obvious example, look at Megadeth's 90's material (aside from Rust In Piece). Is there a higher ratio of quality songs on those albums compared to Load and Reload? Yeah, I'd say so. Yet it's worth bearing in mind that, while Load and Reload were the band just trying something different (the self-titled, admittedly, was confirmed by the band themselves as being a sell out move: they wanted to earn enough money to pay their bills), Megadeth's 90's stuff was a deliberate attempt to dial down the thrash influence in their music in an attempt to gain mainstream appeal. You want to know who said that (if, admittedly, not in those words)? Dave Mustaine himself. In the liner notes for one album (I forget which one, but I think it might have been in the liner notes of Cryptic Writings and it was talking about Countdown To Extinction), Dave admitted being very disappointed that one of the band's albums hadn't made it to the top of the albums charts and admitted that he just wanted an album at the top of the album charts. This drove the band to increasingly aim for a more mainstream sound and eventually lead to getting outside writers, which resulted in Risk. After Risk, the band rebounded to their thrash sound and, at least until they tried a return to their 90's sound with Super Collider, were much loved for their devotion to thrash by a lot of fans, who seem to have swept the undeniable selling out by the band in the 90's under the rug. Yet Metallica's attempt to return to metal with Death Magnetic has done little to stop the vitriol that a lot of metal fans can draw upon for them with a distressing amount of ease.

This all, understandably, seems to me to be horribly unfair to Metallica. I'll admit, I am a bit of a Metallica fan (if, admittedly, not as big of one as I used to be), but it just seems to be unfair to treat Metallica as irredeemable commercial whores when other bands did what Metallica did just as much as (if not more than) what they did and yet seem to get a free pass for it. If people were to say to me (without any anger, of course: yelling in my face is not exactly the best way to get your point across...) "I just can't forgive Metallica for what they did", I'd be happy to back off: I know I don't forgive some people for things they've done to me in my life that, when I think about them now, weren't a big thing and, as such, I understand that sometimes it's hard to let go of anger and hatred when you've held on to it for so long. But it's the hypocrisy of this that drives me up the wall more than anything else and it's one of the big things that stops me from completely embracing the metal subculture beyond the music, as I just don't want to associate myself with the people who do stuff like this. If the only way to become a metalhead in most people's eyes is to be a hypocrite (among a few other things, like denouncing bands just because they're popular or blindly bashing styles of music because I don't like them), then I will refuse to consider myself a metalhead and will, instead, say "Fuck you" to those who promote this kind of behaviour.

So yeah...if you do see someone giving Metallica flack for their mainstream success, you should probably do everyone a favour and point out they weren't the only metal band who tried to get mainstream success and a lot of the other bands have had their attempts to appeal to mainstream success under the rug just because they failed to work. It probably won't turn the tide in the slightest, but, if there are more people willing to call out the hypocrisy inside the metal scene, the scene might stop tearing itself apart and we might find that metal as a whole starts to take more risks with combinations of music styles that will give the scene more of a chance to develop. Because, contrary to what you'd think, metal has not done everything it can do yet. However, a lot of subgenres get a lot of flack for apparently not being "trve metal" (which is, frankly, one of the dumbest justifications I've ever heard for why someone doesn't like something: metal isn't a clean cut genre which can easily be decided as to what is metal and what isn't!), which gives the idea to a lot of people (including fellow metal fans) that the so called "trve" metalheads won't respect anything that isn't extreme metal or by a legendary band. If we can work to getting rid of this concept of so called "trve metal", we might be able to encourage a better view of the scene to people who avoid it due to the rampant elitism of the fandom and maybe find a willingness among the scene to experiment more with music that isn't traditionally associated with metal music.

I can only hope it does happen...I don't think it will, but I hope it does!

The Agonist "Prisoners" Review

If you've previously read my blog, you probably know that I really enjoyed the recently released lyric video for The Agonist's song "Disconnect Me" (incidentally, if you have never visited my blog before now, hi! Nice to have a new face round here!). In that same article, I admitted never being a huge fan of the band, but being eager to see where they went for their fourth album.

Well, this...isn't their fourth album, as anyone who has more than a cursory knowledge of the band would have been able to tell you, but is their third (and last with vocalist Alissa White-Gluz). See, while I wait for the band to finish working on their fourth album and release it, I figured it would be interesting to look at their last album with Alissa and see what it is that they can afford to tighten up (...Those of you who started giggling at that, grow up!) for their next album and what Alissa herself can bring to Arch Enemy, if they let her be herself and don't force her to try to be like Angela. Which is probably what's going to happen, considering most Arch Enemy fans probably don't want to hear melodic vocals or song topics like those from The Agonist...still, I can hope that she'll have more creative input on her second album with the band and we'll get two amazing albums when both bands release their next album!

So, The Agonist originally formed under the name The Tempest (I have no idea whether that was deliberately intended as a reference to Shakespeare or not) in 2004. The founding members were guitarist Danny Marino, bassist Chris Kells and vocalist Alissa White-Gluz. They basically spent the next three years doing...erm, I actually have no idea. All I know is that they recorded their first album (which was actually intended as just a demo), Once Only Imagined, over the course of 2005 and 2006 with the aid of Derek Nadon (who apparently hasn't done anything else of note apart from this) on drums and it was produced by Mythosis and Cryptopsy guitarist Christian Donaldson (who also made a guest appearance on a track...in a vocal role, for some reason), who has produced all the band's albums thus far (and will be producing their fourth album). They sent it off to various labels and it ended up getting released in August 2007 by Century Media Records as their first album (which they released under their new name, The Agonist). So the band added Simon McKay to their line up (then only known for drumming for Endast...I don't know how long he was with them, but he did appear on their debut album, Odds Against Tomorrow) and went on tour. They opened for some fairly big bands in the metal scene while on tour, like Overkill, Epica and Sonata Arctica. Their next album, Lullabies For The Dormant Mind, was released in Europe in late February 2009 and featured a noticeably expanded sound from the band, along with a guest appearance from Youri Raymond (then of Porno Coma...I swear to god that I didn't make that name up!) and a few other people. It contained one of my favourite songs by the band, "Thank You, Pain" as well, as I just LOVE the contrast Alissa does between the accused and the judge in the song thanks to her use of growls...without context, that makes no sense, doesn't it? Well, to help clear it up, here's the video to the song!

Anyway, the band did some more touring (including a tour with Kamelot, Alestorm and Blackguard in late 2011) before they released their third album in June 2012. The rest of the band's history after this can be summed up as "Touring, touring, oh shit, we've lost Alissa, thank God, we've found Vicky, here's "Disconnect Me" for you guys to enjoy while we finish up the album". So, here we are, on the threshold of...excuse me for a second. OY, YOU! YEAH, YOU, THE GUY WHO'S WATCHING THE VIDEO ON REPEAT! PAY ATTENTION TO WHAT I'M SAYING!

*cough*

As I was saying, we stand on the threshold of a new era for the band. With Vicky in The Agonist and Alissa in Arch Enemy, the competition for both women to prove themselves to a new crowd is pretty high. Both are somewhat at the mercy of whatever material they have to sing for their first albums with their new bands and, as such, their first albums will be them having to prove they are up to the job of replacing the band's previous vocalists. But none of that matters at the minute. For now, we're winding back the clock to June 2012...dear god, I needed a haircut back then! And that has to be some of the worst fashion sense this side of the 80s! And I read too much! And what's with the terrible sense of humour, I should...actually, that one's not changed much, never mind! But good lord, I was a geek, that table had more 40k models than...wait, you didn't want me to literally do it? Fine...if I ever get like I was back then again, I'm kicking myself!

Anyway, here's the cover art for the album. I have to say, it's a rather striking cover, but the fact it's mostly restricted to one colour does have me kind of feeling like they could have done with more time to work on it. This appears to be an issue with all of the cover arts for their albums, as they mostly focus on one colour (a dark brown for Once Only Imagined and a purplish blue colour for Lullabies For The Dominant Mind), so I suspect it might be a deliberate style choice, but it just bugs me.

Anyway, The Agonist's third album is a more progressively influenced album than their second album was, while still building upon the band's sound from that album. A fairly reasonable analogy would be compare Metallica's first four albums: they started out with very little progressive metal influence and slowly dialled that influence up, arguably reaching their peak with And Justice For All (which I always found to be a highly overrated album, but that's another can of worms for another day). While I think saying this is the band's And Justice For All would be overselling the band's talents, the basic point still stands: on this album, the band really pushed themselves in terms of technical ability. This results in quite a few VERY impressive performances, but the one I'm going to have to highlight is Simon McKay's performance on the drums. He doesn't put out the best performance I've ever heard, but some of his drumming will have most people asking if the guy does all of his drumming while hyper on caffeine. Seriously, he  pulls off some very fast drumming on this album: "Panaphobia" has some really impressive drumming. Bassist Chris Kells is not especially noticeable in the mix, but this is nothing especially new in extreme metal: most extreme metal bassists tend to just follow the root note of the guitars, so you're not really missing anything. The guitars are just as much the main show of the album as Alissa's vocals are: they do some surprisingly interesting stuff that is a lot more unusual than the band get given credit for among metal purists. I think the best way to describe them is that, once they get past the more typical stereotypes of the metalcore genre (namely, the breakdowns that are part of the music), they pull off some stuff that helps to make the band more unique. Part of it is due to Danny Marino's more...unique way of coming up with guitar riffs (he air guitars them...yes, air guitar isn't just for people who can't play a real guitar!).

Alissa's vocals...well, she's now in Arch Enemy, so, if you've ever heard Angela Gossow's vocals before now, you have a good idea how her harsh vocals sound. I'd say Alissa isn't quite as good at doing the lowest guttural growls than Angela is, but she can do higher notes with her growls (one she sings in "You're Coming With Me" is rather impressive, to say the least!) and she also has a tone to them that indicates at least a bit of influence from black metal shrieks. I think a decent way to describe them, for the benefit of those without a frame of reference for what a female growler sounds like, would be to say that, if you thought of what the voice of a female demon would sound like, her harsh vocals probably wouldn't be too far away from what your mental image is: rather low, surprisingly powerful, rather unsettling to listen to and, basically, not the kind of voice you would want to have yelling at you in the face. Her clean vocals are a bit iffy, though: she's not an especially strong clean singer. Note that I say "not an especially strong clean singer" instead of "rather weak as a clean singer": she is still a good singer, it's just that her clean vocals are somewhat lacking power (although that might be the mix that's to blame: she tends to be fighting to be heard clearly over the rest of the band when she's doing clean singing) and the tone of her singing voice is arguably a bit too poppy to completely fit in with the band's sound (although it's not really a big issue, since she does make it work, so this is more of a nitpick than anything else).

So, now I've talked about everyone's performances on the record, what about the material itself? Well...it's a bit of a mixed bag. There's some brilliant stuff on the album, but there's some stuff that is overly ambitious and reaches further than the band were capable of pulling off and some stuff that just should have spent more time being worked upon. While the determination to do more complicated stuff is certainly commendable, I just don't think they have the technical chops to really pull it off. A good example of this in action is "Ideomotor". It is just over 8 minutes long and, for the life of me, I can't remember anything from the song, despite multiple listens. In fact, a true story: when I was listening through the album for the first time, I actually thought I'd heard at least two songs and was wondering how long the album had left to go before I checked my iPod and was shocked to discover I was still on the same track I was on earlier. So yeah, the band needs to work on making sure their long songs build up throughout the runtime and come to a satisfying climax. I'll give credit to them for trying, but I just think that, if you're going to do a long song, you either need to break the song down into sections (a la Machine Head's "I Am Hell") or throw enough twists and turns to keep the listener engaged for the whole runtime and doesn't give the song time to get boring (a la Masterplan's "Black In The Burn"). It's a shame, as that song is the point when the album takes a noticeable downturn in quality: the first three songs are pretty good and, while I think "Anxious Darwinians" could have done with a bit more work, it's made up for by "Panaphobia", which is flat out brilliant! If these five songs had been released as an EP, it'd have been a brilliant one, but, alas, that's not what happened.

It's after "Ideomotor" that things start to fall apart. "Lonely Solipsist" is fairly solid, if maybe lacking enough of a hook to make it particularly memorable and maybe could have done with being a bit longer than it was, and then the band go back to the more progressive stuff with "Dead Ocean". At nearly six minutes and a third, it doesn't really do anything to justify the runtime and leaves no real impression on you anyway. Again, credit for trying, but it feels like it was stretched a bit too far to really succeed at what the band were trying to do. "The Mass Of The Earth" is...I honestly don't know what to make of this song. The song doesn't get boring, as they throw a lot of ideas into it that are interesting, and it has a pretty cool intro which you'll not be forgetting (although it's a huge shame that they don't use it again in the song), but I still get a strong feeling of "meh" with this song. If it was a deliberate attempt to play around with the typical songwriting patterns, it just left me scratching my head. If this was the band's attempt to create an extreme metal version of "Bohemian Rhapsody", well...I GUESS they succeeded, as it doesn't really follow a traditional songwriting formula and doesn't really have a chorus to it per se, but I have to ask why they didn't make sure it was as epic as they could make it...or just ask them why they did it in the first place. I don't know with this one, go check it for yourself and let me know if I'm being dumb or hitting the nail on the head. "Everybody Wants You (Dead)" (The title of which reminds me of an All Time Low, for some bizarre reason...) is a very strong song...up until the weird screaming section starts around the three minute mark and carries on for about a minute and a half. I'll be honest, I don't get why they had that section in the song, as it just feels very unnecessary and doesn't add anything to the song. Closing the album is "Revenge Of The Dadaists". Now, anyone who is even vaguely familiar with what Dadaism is will be naturally expecting something..."weird as fuck" is probably not the term I'm looking for, but I'll stick with it. Well...it's certainly a very busy song, I'll give them that! It's not especially weird per se (you don't get anything on the levels of weirdness of, say, "Hageshisa to, Kono Mune no Naka de Karamitsuita Shakunetsu no Yami" (yes, I had to look up how to spell that: how the fuck are you supposed to remember that, even if you can speak Japanese?) by Dir En Grey), but you'll probably be rather surprised at how much variety is in this one song! It's worth giving this one a listen, at the very least!

The production is rather typical of extreme metal: fairly loudly produced and the bass is not especially noticeable a lot of the time. For a lot of extreme metal, this is probably a reasonable way to produce stuff (it's MEANT to be unpleasant to listen to if you're not a fan of extreme metal and most metal bassists just are playing the root note of the guitars), so I guess I can't really give my usual complaints about this one when you consider that it's a deliberate aesthetic choice. However, I think that the mixing could have been a bit better when it comes to Alissa's voice: she sounds too quiet when she's singing in her clean voice, making her rather hard to understand a lot of the time! Apart from that, I have to say that, considering the style of music the band play, I have no complaints. I would make my normal complaints if it weren't for the fact that it's probably an aesthetic choice that suits the genre and, well, making the bass louder would be kind of pointless.

So, how do I find this album overall? Well, the band try to stretch themselves on this album and, as a result, the material suffers from getting dull when the band overdoes it. However, it's well performed, there are still some highlights and the production suits the style of music nicely, despite containing my usual complaints regarding modern production. While I can see this album having more than a little appeal to extreme metal fans, I just don't think the band does a good enough job to have me really excited about them. There's enough good material on this to recommend checking it out if you are into more extreme styles of metal or want to get into that kind of metal, but everyone else might want to give this one a miss.

Final Rating: 6 Out Of 10

A slightly above record that is not likely to win over people who aren't interested in this style of music. Fans of the style will probably really enjoy this, but it's just not won me over. Sorry guys, but, at least for me, adding progressive elements didn't make your music better. Maybe next time, eh?

Personal Favourite Tracks: "You're Coming With Me" and "Panaphobia"

(As a note to the readers of my blog who haven't gotten the news from other sources: after my next review, I'll be taking a bit of time off from my blog to focus on doing a double review of Helloween's Pink Bubbles Go Ape and Gamma Ray's Heading For Tomorrow for youtube. This probably won't have a drastic effect on the blog, but it does mean you might not see a new article for a few weeks. I will definitely be back before June, though, even if it's just a little note confirming that I've not retired or something like that!)

Avenged Sevenfold "Hail To The King" Review

Ladies and gentlemen, my name is Nemo Atkins and I'm here to ask and answer one simple question: WTF is Hail To The King?

...Well, it has no video game connections, so that reference was completely pointless.

Anyway, most people will have at least heard about Avenged Sevenfold in passing, as they're one of the biggest bands that can be really connected to metal out there at the minute and, indeed, are considered to be one of the biggest names of the NWOAHM movement (New Wave Of American Heavy Metal), which is mostly made up of various bands playing various styles of metalcore, groove metal, death metal and, occasionally, alternative metal (case of point, some of the other names of the scene that I recognise are As I Lay Dying, Between The Buried And Me, The Black Dahlia Murder, Black Label Society, Disturbed, DevilDriver, The Dilinger Escape Plan, Five Finger Death Punch, Hatebreed, Killswitch Engage, Lamb Of God, Machine Head, Masodon, Sevendust, Slipknot and Trivium...and that's not a complete list of bands considered part of the scene, that's just the names I really recognise from a glance on the Wikipedia page of the scene!). Most of you will probably have spotted quite a few common features among the bands I've just named: aggressive vocals (if not using the more traditional death metal growl or the metalcore scream), very heavy music that still has some degree of melody to it, very popular among the mainstream (although that's more because I don't like the movement much: I'll stick with power metal, traditional heavy metal and glam metal when I want to hear a lot of awesome metal music, thanks!) and generally DESPISED by a lot of metal elitists (likely in relation to my previous point).

Well...as odd a statement is this is going to sound to most people, I think Avenged Sevenfold are somewhat one of the anomalies of the scene. Now, before everyone starts to grab their pitchforks and/or readies their insults for my supposed lack of intelligence, let me stress: I am judging this album AND ONLY THIS ALBUM. Yes, their previous stuff definitely was more in line with the NWOAHM movement, but their albums after City Of Evil slowly moved away from the metalcore influence that made up much of their early sound (and, even on that album, the metalcore influence was somewhat reduced). This album has next to no metalcore influence. Yes, seriously: no metalcore influence to be found here!

And, normally, I'd be triumphing the band for making a bold move away from the sound that made them famous...but there's a noticeable bit of unoriginality on this album, at least some of which gets a tiny bit TOO close to plagiarism, to the point where I'd consider calling in the lawyers about a lawsuit a fairly justified move on the part of the other band in question. However (and I'm aware of the slight hypocrisy of me saying this after rating down bands in the past for not offering anything new), unoriginality in and of itself isn't necessarily a bad thing: so many bands out there just go out there and play what they like that condemning a different band for doing the same thing is rather unfair. The problem is when the quality goes down and the unoriginality becomes an issue that you cannot ignore. Has that happened here? Well...yes and no. While I wouldn't call it a brilliant album (and I still think that Metallica should consider a copyright lawsuit for "This Means War"), there's some good stuff on Hail To The King, if you look at it as an album in and of itself.

First of all, let's start with the cover art. It's...unoriginal.

Yeah...some of you might be wondering why I'm throwing accusations of this being unoriginal. Well, here's the cover art for the band's second album, Waking The Fallen:

Yeah...and this isn't the second time they've used that kind of theme for their cover art, either! Here's the cover art to their fourth album:

Maybe they have a rule about using bats for their even numbered albums?

...OK, to be fair to the band, they DID have a different cover art intended for their sixth album cover, but they changed it due to fan backlash against it. Here's the original cover:

Looking at this with my (admittedly, very limited) knowledge of art, I think that this COULD have become an awesome album cover. If they'd gone for a darker selection of colours and had all of the people being attacked by the king (I can't help asking if he's meant to be king nothing? Sorry, terrible Metallica joke...) drenched in a pool of blood (with the king himself dripping with it), it might have looked a lot better, although maybe that's getting into slightly too dark territory for them to get away with it. Ah well, there's always the cover art for the vinyl edition of the album, which is a noticeable improvement!

HELL, YEAH!

...Sorry, ex-Warhammer 40,000 fan here. It's just that that's pretty much what I'd pictured Khorne on his throne to look like, only with more blood in the background and him being more like a giant Bloodthirster than the sinister skeleton here! BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD! SKULLS FOR THE SKULL THRONE!

...Anyway, I've taked about the band's cover arts enough. Let's look at the actual album itself.

Pre-release interviews for this album indicated a more conscious decision to return to the core of heavy metal, with a few mentions of groove metal. Well...I don't exactly agree that this is a complete return to the core of heavy metal, but the band certainly have taken a very noticeable step away from metalcore and gone for a sound that shows a lot of appreciation for early hard rock and traditional heavy metal, with a bit of groove thrown in (although, considering 70's hard rock and early heavy metal had a lot of blues influence, I think that it might be worth pointing out that it's not groove metal a la Five Finger Death Punch that I'm being reminded of, but more like a general groove to the music that reminds me a bit of 70's hard rock and early heavy metal...). While this, unsurprisingly, means that the material doesn't feel especially original, I think that they deserve a bit of a free pass on this one, considering that they made a conscious decision to do this and were open about doing this when they were asked what the album sounded like.

The issue, as I've mentioned before, is that the quality of the material does suffer a bit through making this decision. While there are some strong tracks on here, the issue is that quite a few tracks feel like they need a bit more kick to them to really get beyond being politely skippable. There's also the VERY noticeable issue with "This Means War" taking more than a few hints from "Sad But True": in fact, I think it gets UNCOMFORTABLY close to that song. If it was a song that wasn't well known by Metallica fans, like "Invisible Kid" (and every Metallica fan has just tried to work out what album that song is from...I'd hate to see their reaction when they do find it!), I wouldn't be too concerned by it, but this is one of Metallica's best known songs, for goodness sake! You go to a Metallica gig, you're bound to hear this song, no question about it! However, at the end, it's just one song: there's nine other songs on the standard version of the album with which you should help base your opinion of the album upon. And the good part? There are some really great songs on here, if you give the album a fair listen!

The first two tracks on the album, "Shepard Of Fire" and the title track, are brilliant and among my favourite Avenged Sevenfold tracks. I also quite enjoy "Coming Home", which is a very strong song that I quite enjoy listening to. I also have to say that the choruses to "Heretic" "Crimson Day" and "Doing Time", despite them not being songs that I'm a huge fan of, are really very strong and worth a listen. Also, if the unoriginality of the song is ignored, "This Means War" isn't actually a bad song. I would say that "Acid Rain" has an enjoyable chorus as well, although I find the rest of the song rather dull. Anything I've not mentioned is just kind of there: it doesn't leave me with any impression beyond "meh".

The performances on the record are pretty much what you'd expect if you've heard an Avenged Sevenfold album before now (only without M. Shadows doing any harsh vocals). I have to say that new drummer Arin Ilejay does a brilliant job at replacing The Rev (who died in 2009 and has a song specifically related to him on this album titled "St James", which is sadly relegated to being a bonus track on the deluxe version of the album) and temporary member Mike Portnoy (yes, Dream Theater's drummer, among a lot of other bands: he did the drumming for their previous album, Nightmare, and also did a few tours with them until Arin temporarily joined the band and was later made an official member of the band): it'd be impossible to tell that there's anyone new behind the kit if you didn't know that they had someone new behind the kit, which is a very impressive achievement when you consider that Mike freaking Portnoy was (admittedly, not as an official member) part of the band! M. Shadows is his usual "love it or hate it" self. While I won't say he's somewhat like James LaBrie (he doesn't have the same range or the same level of talent (from a technical perspective) to compare favourably to him), he is in that same class of singers that get a VERY divided opinion, depending on who you ask. Personally, I'd say he's an OK singer: he has a fairly good range and a reasonable amount of power to his voice, but the nasal nature of it can be very grating if you're not used to it. He also doesn't have a brilliant voice from a technical perspective, but hey, the same could be said of most thrash metal vocalists! Lead guitarist Synyster Gates is pretty good, I have to say! I don't think he doesn't anything quite as impressive as he does on some of the band's previous albums, but he certainly keeps himself busy across the album. I don't think Zacky Vengeance and Johnny Christ really do anything especially impressive across the album, but they don't do anything bad either.

And we now come to the production on this album. You know how I normally say stuff like "It's probably a bit too loud" or "It could have done with being quieter"? Well...I'm not going to have to say it this time! Seriously, the mastering on this album is just wonderful: it's still loud enough to stand up to modern albums, but it still has a strong sense of dynamics that so many metal albums seem to lack today! It's a huge breath of fresh air to the ears (I know that makes no sense to read, but you know what I mean!) to actually have an album that doesn't feel like it's trying to deafen you and you actually WANT to turn up because you know you're not risking getting tinnitus or going deaf from the mastering of the album! From a mixing perspective, I still think the bass is a bit on the quiet side, but that's a personal nitpick for me. Other than that..."fucking flawless" are the words that spring to mind to describe the production of this album. Seriously, if anyone reading this ever has to produce any music in the future, take your cues from this album, turn the bass up a bit more than it is on here (although make sure the bassist is actually doing something interesting first: if the bassist isn't doing anything interesting and is just following the root note for the whole album, feel free to keep them quiet if you want to) and I'll be practically worshiping you as a producer!

So, how does this album stand up? Well, it's brilliantly produced, has some really good songs on it that make it worth checking out and has some brilliant performances on the album, but it's let down by being somewhat unoriginal and having a few songs which don't get beyond being skippable (and one that is practically begging for a lawsuit). By all accounts, I feel I should be giving this a 6 out of 10, but I'm feeling generous to this album, due to the fact that I consider the production on this album to be the new standard by which we should be judging metal albums by...stuff it, I'm giving it an extra point!

Final Rating: 7 Out Of 10

Avenged Sevenfold have taken a step towards a new horizon, albeit one which needs a bit more work on finding an original sound and tightening up the songwriting. All aspiring producers would do well to pick this up, though: this is how a modern metal album should sound!

Personal Favourite Songs: "Shepard Of Fire", "Hail To The King", "Coming Home"

(If you're wondering why I didn't bother to talk about Avenged Sevenfold's history...well, they're a big enough band at this point that I think doing so would have been a huge waste of time!)

Diamond Plate "Generation Why" Review

...Honestly, I don't know where to start with this album. I know it's going to be odd that THIS is the album which has me questioning whether I can review it (and Overexposed wasn't), as it's not as bad as some of the stuff I've listened to in my life, but there's only so many times that you can say variants of "This is boring" before you start sounding like a broken record. And there's only so many times you can make the same complaints again and again before even you are sick of hearing them. Both of those issues are in abundance when I try to find the words to sum up this album. It really isn't an unlistenable album (indeed, it has quite a few really good moments to it), but it's mostly a mediocre sea of boredom and it keeps sinking itself for the same reasons.

*Sigh* OK, let me back up a bit.

Diamond Plate are a thrash metal band from Illinois in Chicago that has been around since 2004 (which is all the more impressive when you learn that every single member of the band was in high school at the time: indeed, most of the members of the band appear to be in their early 20's now, according to my quick internet search about the members). They released their first EP, Mountains Of Madness, in January 2008 and, in April, appeared on a split with Swedish thrashers Oppression (coincidently, also Oppression's last release). In mid-2009 (my research fails me on the exact release date), the band followed this up with their second EP, Relativity, which included three re-recorded songs from their first EP and a new song. Apparently, these two EPs and the split must have caused some heads to turn to pay attention to them, for they would release their debut album on the 9th of August in the US (the UK and Europe would have to wait until the 29th of August). It got a HUGE amount of hype among metal critics, with a lot of reviews indicating it was one of the best retro-thrash albums to come out in a good while.

Well...I don't get the hype. At all.

Before I get to looking at the album itself, I have to say that the cover artwork is rather neat. Yeah, it's obviously a photo, so calling it "artwork" might be stretching the word a bit, but I just think it's a neat idea and, well, it works.

OK, let me bring up my big issues with this album now. I know I'm going to sound like some thrash purist with this, but these just drag the album for me so much that I can't really ignore them.

1. The vocals. Dear god, the vocals...OK, they're not as bad as I'm making them out to be (they certainly aren't as bad as those of Kamelot's first vocalist, Mark Vanderbilt), but they have no grit to them and are far too high to really suit thrash metal. Thrash metal isn't a genre that is friendly to vocalists who have a vocal range of tenor (or soprano, for the ladies...yes, there are female vocalists in the thrash metal scene!), you generally need to have a lower voice to get the grit necessary to be a great thrash vocalist. About the only real exception to this rule that springs to mind is Steve Souza, and I'd still say he can grate on your ears. This guy, however, sounds like he heard Paul Baloff on Bonded By Blood and thought "Hey, I can do that!" and proceeded to do it...but without actually taking the time to look for the little details that made Baloff the vocalist he was. The end result is best summed up as a hardcore yell, but with none of the power needed to make them actually sound good and none of the grit that is needed to potentially make them work in this band. Even considering the guy would have been 18 when this album was recorded, he just flat out doesn't stand up as a strong enough vocalist for this band. While they DID get someone new for their second album, they unfortunately went for a guy who sounds fairly similar to this guy, which only made the fact that their second album was worse than this one more glaringly obvious. I think they need to find a guy with a voice a bit more like Chuck Billy of Testament if they want to find a great person for the vocal position. If they want to stick with a higher voice, then get someone like Steve Souza. Just don't get another guy who thinks he's Paul Baloff, OK?
2. The production. Now, normally, I don't have a problem with modern production (it's not the 80's, people, so stop asking bands to go for crappy 80's production on their albums today, because it ain't gonna happen!), but this production is just...ugh. From a purely technical standpoint, it's completely fine, but it's just got no edge to it, which is what more aggressive styles of music really need to work properly. You can get a rather gritty sound with modern production (as much as some people will claim otherwise), but this just isn't it. If you want to hear a rather gritty (if loud) production that suits thrash metal, go check out Death Angel's album The Dream Calls For Blood. Then listen to this. You'll see what I'm talking about very quickly. Interestingly, my same complaint for this album also applies (albeit to a lesser extent than here) to Death Angel's album Relentless Retribution, but I'm getting sidetracked. Point is, the production on this album does the music no favours.

But these shouldn't be enough for me to get annoyed at this album, right? After all, some bands can release amazing albums with both of those problems and I can still like them, so how can this be the album that has me going "Where do I go from here?"

Well...the music just isn't up to scratch, a lot of the time. It's not bad, but, most of the time, I feel like I'm politely waiting for the band to impress me (after all, if you can't impress a listener on your debut album, chances are they won't bother with you in the future, unless line up issues bring in another musician that the listener really enjoys...) and they're not living up on their side of the bargain. Now, to be fair to the guys, they are young and, as such, have the potential to go on to become brilliant musicians in their own right. But I'm not going to go "Well, it's a bad album, but they're young guys, so I'll give them a pass" just to be nice. When you make a professionally released album, you have to be willing to accept that, at the end of the day, it's not how old the musicians are that is being judged (although how old the musicians are can affect how you perceive certain things), but the music itself. And, if the music isn't up to scratch, then playing nice just because the performers are young and probably don't know better isn't going to help them to improve. Sometimes, the kindest thing you can do at that point is to say "This isn't a brilliant album". And, bear in mind, these guys are actually slightly older than I am (I'm 21 later this year), so this isn't a grumpy old man going "You young 'uns don't know how to thrash. Why, back in my day, we played thrash from the soul because it was all we knew what to do" or some kind of crap like that: this is a guy who understands that they've made a brilliant achievement just releasing this album at their age, but still thinks that words need to be said to help them to improve in the future, because I recognise that these guys have the talent to succeed, but not the songwriting skills to bring them to the heights they should be able to reach with that talent.

First, let me cover the good stuff on here, because I'd be lying if I were to say that there's no good songs on here. The intro is rather unsettling, if bringing to mind modern Megadeth a bit too much for my liking (a personal complaint I have is dialogue in music unless it's part of a musical or a rock opera a la Operation: Mindcrime, although I can let it slide this time, considering it's not an actual song). "Generation Why" is really, REALLY good, for all of my complaints. I'm faintly reminded of Testament, with a bit of Exodus and Slayer influence thrown in for flavour. The lyrics aren't brilliant, but I've heard far worse lyrics on songs that I really enjoy, so I can't complain too much.

Then, near the end of the album, we get to "At The Mountains Of Madness". Now, I've heard the version that was on their Relativity EP and, I have to say, I prefer the EP version over the album version: it was faster and nicely captured the nearly out of control speed that you really need to do in thrash if you don't want to groove. The album version is slowed down by more than a bit (it's about half a minute longer than the EP version, which is a noticeable lengthening when you consider that the EP version was JUST under four minutes long!), but the point of the song itself still stands fairly well. I just wish that they could have just done the song more like the EP version, as it would have sounded brilliant on the album in that version. It's still a highlight on the album, but, comparing it to the EP version, it just feels...tame, if you pardon me returning to sounding like a thrash purist for a second.

The rest of the album, though...I think saying it's mostly a descent into mediocrity wouldn't be too much of an exaggeration. Now, thrash is not one of my favourite styles of metal out there (most of the time, I tend to find that most bands are so focused on writing fast music that they forget to actually give you a reason to listen to it beyond the speed...), but I've always been able to enjoy listening to thrash metal without too many complaints. This album, though, leaves me bored very quickly, even when I put it on for background listening. Case of point, I've sat through this album goodness knows how many times since I got it and I cannot remember any other songs from the album, no matter how hard I try! That's not a good sign, guys: I don't listen to albums to help me get to sleep, I listen to them because I want to enjoy the music on it! I can remember stuff from Overexposed, despite my rating for the album, than I can from this album. Maybe I'm being harsh, but, if you think writing a song without some degree of hook makes you a "trve" metal warrior, then you're only going to end up writing a song that will result in most people will be hitting the skip button when it starts, no matter how well written it is!

So, now I've got all of that out of my system, is there anything really GOOD about this album? Well...yes and no. The guitar work is pretty good (indeed, the lead guitarist (Konrad Kupiec) might want to try to have a word or two with Joe Satriani if he can, as I reckon he might be able to learn much from the guy and might even become the next Alex Skolnick, if he is willing to put the work into it...although I highly doubt the guy is going to form a jazz trio!) and the drumming is pretty impressive. I've already mentioned my issues with the vocals, so I'll not bore you with that again, but the same guy also plays bass on this album. He doesn't really do anything interesting, though, so don't worry about it too much. I guess the production (if you don't have the same complaint I do regarding how little bite it has) is perfectly fine, if still suffering from the same issues I usually bring up whenever I write a review (although the bass complaint can be forgiven this time: he's not really doing anything that is going to have most bassists suddenly proclaiming him to be the next Cliff Burton or anything like that, he just spends a lot of his time following the guitars). However, having talent doesn't mean shit if you can't write a song that demonstrates this talent within a song that you actually want to listen to. As an example, Journey's lead guitarist (Neal Schon) is a guitar virtuoso, but he doesn't let his amazing guitar skills detract from the band's music: if anything, he usually dials it down to suit the band's music, which I think is a better way to show how skilling a musician you are. If you can play a wide variety of styles of music without dominating the proceedings at any time, then it says far more to me than being able to play guitar solos that are over 40 minutes long which are amazing from a technical level, but horribly dull to actually listen to.

So, there's certainly talent in this band, but it's being wasted by unimpressive songwriting and poor vocals. I'd love to be able to say that the guys got better with their second album, but, unfortunately, word of mouth is that they actually have gotten WORSE since then. While I can't comment on this from first hand experience, I can tell you that I heard a single from the album recently and was bored stiff before it was even halfway through (and this wasn't an epic length track, mind you...). So yeah...guys, get a grip on your songwriting for your third album, get a stronger vocalist (and ideally one with a lower voice) and, for the love of God, try to get a producer who doesn't produce metal albums without any bite to them!

Final Rating: 4 Out Of 10

With a lot of dull material and several issues that hamper any of the success that the band could have built up, only check this out if you are VERY good at ignoring poor vocals and don't mind sitting through a lot of mediocre thrash metal in the hopes of finding a few gems that I may have missed.

Personal Favourite Tracks: "Generation Why" and "At The Mountains Of Madness"

(As a quick note for those who are familiar with the album and are curious as to what rating I would have given the album if the issues that are not restricted to the songwriting were sorted, I honestly would have said that, had they had a more suitable vocalist for their music and a production that was more suitable for more extreme styles of metal, I would have considered it a 6 out of 10. I'm not saying it's a bad album, in spite of my ratings and review indicating otherwise, I just think the band aren't strong enough songwriters to really get beyond being merely "OK" and, with the other issues on top of it, the album descends to becoming an album that I just can't recommend. Die hard thrashers who can ignore the issues I mentioned, please treat this as a 6 out of 10, not the 4 out of 10 that I've officially given it.)