CD

Saga is a Canadian rock band that has been around for some forty years or so, who over that period have released 21 studio albums if I’m correct.  It is however not one of my preferred bands, although they have some good songs.

Rob Moratti started his career in the nineties as lead vocalist and songwriter of the band Moratti.  Around the millennium he teamed up with songwriet Mladen and they formed Final Frontier.  In 2008 he became the singer in famous Canadian rockband Saga.

Being a fan of Journey himself, he decided it was time to bring a tribute to them, so he recorded these 12 songs. Among them some of my all time Journey favorites like ‘Don’t Stop Believin’ or ‘Anyway You Want It.

Just like another band I’ve recently revied, Full Devil Jacket this band, Pyogenesis has taken over a decade to release new material.  And just like FDJ and even more so, this is a band I’d never heard of before.

Having checked up on this band, I found out this band was founded in 1991 in Stuttgart, and that they were in some sort the founders of the Gothic Metal Genre.

This iis already the sixth studio album from this German band that was created in 2003 by brothers Charles and Matthew Greywolf.  It took them a while to complete the line-up of the band, but in the end they found the perfect key-stone in the person of Romanian Attila Dorn, who became their vocalist.

And, while I knew the band existed, I had never felt the urge to listen to one of their albums, thinking it would be the umpteenth German metal band.  But I now have to admit I made a big mistake.

Jim Peterik,the driving force behind Survivor and The Ides Of March has in the past collaborated with a score of vocalist, who in the beginning were relatively unknown, but later became big stars.

To name but a few of them : Jimi Jamison, Toby Hitchcock  and Dave Bickler.

For this album he teamed up with Marc Scherer, who also lives in Chicago, and despite being a long time musician, was up to know unknown, his main occupation being a jeweler.

Nashville Pussy were formed in 1998 in Atlanta, out of the ruins of Blaine Cartwrights former band Nine Pound Hammer, and his wife Ruyter Suys, a lady he met at a Nine Pound Gig.  The 16 studio tracks on disc 1 are taken from their 3 SPV releases. The other disc is a bonus disc, containing songs form a gig they played in Nottingham.

A new album from House Of Lords is something I’m always looking for.  In all those years since this band, fronted by James Christian came on the scene, they’ve never managed to release a bad album.

It has to be said they won’t win the price for originality or inventiveness, as time upon time they go back to their roots, but hey is that so bad ?  Other bands have done the same, if I only may mention one of my all time metal gods Iron Maiden.  So what you get on this album is melodic hard rock, well performed.

It’s been 15 years since Full Metal Jacket’s last releaseand you even could say it’s almost a miracle this album saw the light of day.  Indeed, on the verge of becoming one of the bigger names on the scene, after succesfull tours with bands like Nickelback and Creed, disaster struck when frontmen Josh Brown almost died from an overdose.

What the heck is this I thought.  From the first moment on, I hear nothing but grunts and growls, interspaced with some more normal singing.  The rhythm is ferocious, fast paced, you cannot understand what they are singing.

I guess what these Frenchies bring us, is a mix of death metal, and despite the fact that this band was founded in 1992, has toured extensively and has released a score of albums before, this is the first time I had to listen to this band, and it will also be the last.

This is a type of music/album I absolutely hate !

When I played this album for the first time, similarities between this band’s music and Sonata Arctica where something I immediately remarked.  And this should not sound as a wonder, since the brain between this was none other than Jani Liimatainen, one of the founding members of Sonata Arctica.