Suburban

Hah...now there's a novel thing: a band describing themselves as “Austrian Alpencore”. As to what that entails, I will tell you later...first we do the history bit, okay?

The people at Victory Records really have a nice taste of music, concentrating on bands which are musically special, and somewhat “out-of-the-box”. Originally concentrating on the Hardcore and Punk genres, the guys have meanwhile broadened that palate to include bands from other genres...but at all times, there's still that somewhat special side to the bands, which stems from a will to bring something slightly more progressive.

Oh my, what the heck have they put in my to-do box now! No, wait a minute Tony, before slaggin' this thing down, first get to the history bit! Yeah...well okay!

There is apparently a history of friendship between this Liverpool based artist, and 359Music's CEO & producer Alan McGee, which goes back to 2007, when Chris was fronting the band The Grants and played at McGee's West London night club Death Disco. According to McGee, they clicked on the basis of both being “a round peg in a square hole”, and if he'd had a label back then, the band would've been signed on the spot!

Fans of Axel Rudi Pell can buy this new album without any hesitation.  Once again, this band, who started out in the late eighties, has brought us a very good album. If, like me, you’re old enough to have lived in the eighties, and are a metal fan, you might probably still remember Axel Rudi Pell’s  work with Steeler (The German Steeler, not to be confused with the band  that featured Ron Keel).

Metal Inquisitor was founded in 1998 by Blumi and Witchhammer. The idea behind the band was to play classic, traditional heavy metal. After some time the gang assigned Kronos for the bass guitar and El Rojo as the singer.

I EXIST are a sextet from Australian capital Canberra,   and on there  3th full length they present us a slab of  darkness one would not immediately  link to surfers paradise down under.  What I Exist  offer us is   downtuned    guitar violence , ranging from  doom to stoner  sludge with a hint of death  metal and  some  hardcore.  The vocals can be filed under “guttural”.  Not  all tracks on “From Darkness” manage to   score high on my   “attention span radar”  but when they  let  the sludge & doom  approach take  priority  o

(intro based on my review of last year’s Bereue Nichts-album; for full review: see update within the Archives, posted on October 31^st 2012)

Running Wild could be called a dinosaur, because they were formed way back in 1976, and besides a hiatus of some three years between 2009, when they split up, and their reformation in 2011, have kept around, with many personnel changes over these years. 

Merely a year has passed since the release of their ‘Shadowmaker’ album.  This album seems to go back to their nineties releases, and as far as I’m considered, is not a bad album, but also an album that will not remain in your memory for too long.  It’s some standard eighties/nineties metal no more no less.

How he manages to combine them all is a riddle to me, but between his work as a producer and with his bands Casanova/Demon Drive, and Wolfpakk, Michael Voss has found the time to also write an record songs for a next Mad Max album. The career of this band spans some thirty years, although with lots of splits stops and restarts, but this does not show in this brand new album.