A lot of good new stuff this week. It’s looking to be a good year so far, what’s nice about this week, is the Top 5 adds are almost pretty different, Callenish Circle with melodic death metal, Dark Funeral with black metal, hard/thrash/metalcore with the Bleeding Through and Sworn Enemy. Then you got the Eddie Ojeda with some old school sounding almost borderline power metal.
Callenish Circle
[Pitch.Black.Effects]
Metal Blade
43:27 – 10 Tracks
Nice to hear from these guys again, I made them the top “add” for the week. Great vocals, that pounding thrashing metal sound. Nice solid production, nice riffs, and as I like to use the word again, BRUTAL vocals. Seems to be Metal Blade’s version of the Scandanavian melodic death metal. Great band, kind of keeping the “In Flames” sound heavy.
Dark Funeral
Attera Totus Sanctus
Candlelight Records
42:56 – 8 Tracks
Another release from the masters of Satan, Dark Funeral. It’s pretty much what you’d expect from them. Heavy, brutal, well produced black metal. ’nuff said.
Bleeding Through
The Truth
Trustkill Records
43:13 – 12 Tracks
This band played on Ozzfest a couple years ago, toured a lot and helped shape the sound that’s like all the rage these days. Brutal drums, guitar, angry growls, then sometimes a slowdown and a nice melodic break, only to go right back to brutal! Good stuff
Sworn Enemy
The Beginning of the End
Abacus Records
49:11 – 99 Tracks (There’s really 11 tracks, but they split everything up into 20 second tracks to spoil mp3 ripping… here’s a clue, IT DOESN’T WORK, it just makes it a pain for your friendly DJ to cue up the right track!!)
But, I digress. Sworn Enemy doesn’t come to mess around. Good fast paced songs, no fucking around, just an all out aural assault. I can just see the circle pits spinning and thrashing right now. Good solid production, has a good thump and feel, and yup… brutal!
Eddie Ojeda
Axes 2 Axes
Black Lotus Records
Eddie as you may know was/is the guitarist from Twisted Sister. This is his first solo album and the opening track features the metal legend of Ronnie James Dio on vocals. Dee Snyder, Joe Lynn Turner, Rudy Sarzo and others contribute to this release. There’s a fun cover of “Eleanor Rigby” It’s pretty much a straight forward hard rock album. Being that it’s a guitarist’s solo album, there are some great shredding guitar moments and the all-star band does a fine job.
Breakdance
Mistaken Grave
The Curse Records
27:20 – 10 tracks
CD in the inbox, “local” metal from Iowa City. Starts off with some cookie monsterish growl. Production is pretty awful, sounds like I’m listening through a telephone. Maybe not that bad, but there isn’t much in the way of dynamic range or frequency range. The music has some promise, pretty good guitar solos and the songs are put together well. I’d like to see these guys live! Here’s their web site http://breakdance666.com/ Too bad it’s a tripod site, c’mon guys, you have a domain name, spend the usually less than $50 and get a real site going!
Short Fuse
Hate Brought To This Place Called Home
No Label – Unsigned (Promoted by Freekshow Promotions)
48:42 – 13 Tracks
For a band that isn’t signed yet, the best thing to do is get a good sounding CD produced, hire a promotion company to send it out to a bunch of press/radio stations and get their name out there. They kind of have a Chimaira sound to them with some mudvayne/slipknot thrown in. But it’s a bit more raw. They have a sampler/keyboard thing making some neat effects, but still maintain their heaviness. Just doing a skip-thru of the CD, a lot of the songs sound pretty similar.
Nocturnal Rites
Grand Illusion
Century Media
46:38 – 10 Tracks
Good ol solid melodic power hard rock metal! Nothing too thrashy here, but straight forward melodic metal from Sweden. They kind of have the hard rock anthem, almost sing along stuff going on. A lot of vocal processing, seems like there’s a bunch of keyboard, but they don’t have a keyboard player listed as a full time band member. As I read the bio sheet though, Jens Johansson from Stratovarius plays on the album, also guests from Naglfar, Hammerfall and Evergrey members. All in all, a solid prog-ish metal release from a veteran band of the genre.
Lullacry
Vol. 4
Century Media
Another veteran female fronted metal band. They made their life US debut at Metalfest a few years ago and put on a pretty good show. They aren’t really thrash or heavy metal, more like a hard-rock. Pretty decent release. I was hoping for something a little heavier, but what can you do?
Last week we were supposed to have the Wicked Wisdom sampler. As you might know, this is Jada Pinkett’s band that played Ozzfest in 2005. Their live show was pretty good actually. Her band is made up mostly of people from Fishbone and Body Count. This 2 song sampler is good and puncy, it’s kind of nu-metal sounding, but they’ll always be the band with Will Smith’s wife.
We got a huge package from Black Lotus Records (From Greece) last week. They sent about 10 releases, most of them are pretty good from various European bands encompassing different metal genres. I’ll put reviews up and play some on the air in the upcoming weeks/months.
So, yeah, a lot of good stuff this week. Listen to the ‘pit to hear it, if it sounds good from what I wrote, ca;ll and request it! Thanks…