The Scrutinizing Serpent

Release date: March 1987
Website: Agent Steel’s MySpace page
Label: Combat Records

Un. Stoppable. Force. That is the one line to describe the monstrosity of Agent Steel’s Unstoppable Force. This is the kind of force so extreme and so intense in terms of speed metal that the album artwork for this record should be shown in the dictionary term for speed metal. If not, then Oxford Dictionaries or wherever makes your dictionaries are in need of a correction and this album will be the last thing they hear if they do not make the correction.

With sounds of a UFO arriving to earth, the title rack takes no preparation to warm up and invasion commences without humanity’s chance. The riffs are on a rapid fire mode that rarely any other metal bands would even touch and this is what you’ll expect from the album’s general personality. If you’ve always wanted to hear a metal band playing the most aggressive, fastest and hardest riffs imaginable, you’ve come to the right place. These aren’t riffs they just slightly alter from one track to another, Bernie Versailles and Juan Garcia have the brains of scientists to work on plenty of ideas and evaluated the most powerful riffs from the results. All of sudden, it feels Kerry King was a mere novice at playing his guitar when Reign in Blood was written.

For each and every song, there are efficacious solos ranging to provide from the invading, blazing “Indestructive” to the slow and somewhat relaxing “Still Searchin’” and even to the gentlest and slowest song “Traveler” that has a soothing solo, an ironically appropriate way to close the album. Even the intro for “Chosen to Stay” starts off calm with the clean guitar and builds its way to a unique kind of solo that’s more than likely to shoot lazers from the guitar itself. These solos even produce melodies of their own without the song itself forcing them to do so. “Nothin’ Left” shows how they make a solo with a prime melody. The majority of other bands write solos that barely differentiate from other solos but Unstoppable Force adds a different tune to them all and if you heard a solo at random from the album, it’s instantly recognisable regardless of which song it is.

While “Still Searchin’” and “Traveler” may be polar opposites of speed metal, the slower tracks help to cool the band down after a consecutive of speed metal frenzies whilst showing the inner beauty of the record as a whole. The two tracks conveniently end both sides of the vinyl with the calmer songs while “Still Searchin’” is just a calm before the storm for side B for more mayhem. There’s even a canon between the two songs involving the Traveler reflecting on loneliness and the emptiness of the soul. That kind of lyrical work wouldn’t work if it was all fast and furious like the rest of the songs. If the guitar musicianship wasn’t enough, “The Day at Guyana” is a 6 ½ minute instrumental and depending on the band, mass of creativity can be a struggle to write a lengthy but Agent Steel kept it fresh to change course several times even to settling the track to closely observe the current situation. Does the quality of guitar works decline here? Absolutely not as the menacing and crushing riff only adds to the great versatility of this record.

This is one of the two albums John Cyriis appeared on and his vocal work was at his best here. He could hold his notes as long as Eric Adams from Manowar could while taking on extremely high notes. Those who can handle his over the top vocals will observe what he has to offer on the whole record and know that he does his stuff very well. He’ll keep up at insane speed of the band’s music but will also wind down for the slower tracks and for “Still Searchin’”, he’ll sneak in his soaring voice that makes the rest of the songs embracing. With this potential, leaving it at this album was far too soon for Cyriis.

Mike Zaputil on the bass makes his presence amongst the other alien-like musicians. His strongest moment is by far on “The Day at Guyana” where the band settles down for him to make his magnificent bass moment on the record. He also has a quick moment on the title track before it’s mayhem for the first solo on the album. The power of the bass adds to the unstoppable force of the guitars and this Mike makes his worthy addition to Agent Steel. The does not leave Chuck Profus on the drums without any capabilities presented on the album. Chuck is the ideal speed metal drummer with a lot of force on the drums and plenty of movement on the drumkit handled throughout. The best display with him is for “The Day at Guyana” which like Zaputil, it gives plenty of chance to execute some amazing performances. You can say the instrumental track justifies all the instrumentalists.

The lyrical themes for the album goes without saying. It’s blatant over the top sci-fi invasion songs but the lyrics themselves are incredibly catchy. When you’re writing an album as forceful as this, you better have lines that will make you want to shout out these words to the whole galaxy. Agent Steel nailed that and they knew damn well that without lines such as “hammering metal into your heads” and “don’t give in, never surrender”, the vigorous songs would only be half as effective.

The overall quality for Unstoppable Force is already described on the album title. Agent Steel never cease for a single second to supply the listener with supreme speed metal. The fast songs are so immense that they will chase the Klingons back to their homeworld and it’s all thanks to the genius songwriting on guitar for aggressive riffs and insane solos as well as John Cyriis’ threatening voice. With nine highly memorable songs including calming songs with inner force and an instrumental to put the instrumentals at their highest capabilities, Unstoppable Force is one in a million for heavy metal and speed metal can hardly get any better than this.

Overall rating: 5/5 (Unstoppable is right!)

Release date: 16th January 2012
Website: Drakkar’s MySpace page
Label: My Kingdom Music

It wasn’t long ago when I discovered this treachery of a band with their debut album Quest for Glory. Seems timing made it convenient for me to find out that Drakkar have released a new album in 2012 entitled When Lightning Strikes. Hoping that after 14 years they would have made vastly improved their musical capabilities, they are still as incompetent as ever with only a few more moments worth hearing. Like Quest for Glory, the record kicks off with a pointless orchestra intro that adds absolutely no real musical input. It doesn’t help when the second track “Day of the Gods” feels like another interlude track and this may slip if it was a concept album but from the looks of things, When Lightning Strikes is no concept album so buckle up for a ride with load of nonsense that we didn’t even need to hear to begin with.

The first real track “The Armageddon Machine” actually starts off really good. This is the combating riff that you’d expect to hear from Manowar. However, with this time you may as well be listening to Manowar seeing as the riff here is merely a watered down version from the superior. The song’s redeeming value is completely lost from the awful keyboards. This is the kind of keyboard player that makes himself obnoxious during the solo sections for themselves and making you wish they had never included a keyboardist to begin with. To find more decent riffing from the record, skip straight to “At the Flaming Shores of Heaven” which again at least shows the guitarist was able to come up with a few adequate ideas even by playing a solo with a bit of charisma but apart from that, rarely anything else is done throughout. This is one song to spare on your music library for being well above an average Drakkar song.

Unfortunately, vocals are still as inconsistent as ever. Although there are two different vocalists here being Luca Cappellari from the first two Drakkar records and the new main singer Davide Dell’Orto. Both seem to go all over the place and it’s not easy telling who is who, especially when neither have a strong characteristic vocal style. Admittedly, the vocals did at least hook me with “Winter Soldiers” for the chorus so it’s at least moving away from being the most laughable and cheesy chorus that they unleashed to power metal with “Coming from the Past”.

While there are at least some decent riffs on the album, it still doesn’t help for the fact that for the most part the guitarist is uninspired and lacking. There may still be some tolerable solos located throughout but then you’re still back to those boring galloping which for 2012’s standards only looks unoriginal and adding no real surprises to the music. It really doesn’t help when certain songs only remind you of better metal bands such as “Salvation” making you think of Running Wild’s “Beggars’ Night” but way less engaging and raw and the rawness feel of “Beggars’ Night” added a factor to that song. At this point the only surprises were the odd riff or two that was worth hearing for a brief period. Once again the bassist is just sitting in the corner and not making any attempts to jump out to the listener and get any real attention from the album in general. As for the drummer, still not adding a huge force to the music and only goes along with the music with as little effort as possible.

What Drakkar felt was necessary to do was constantly adding sound clips. “In the Belly of the Beast” is pretty much just sounds clips and no other input from the band. If there was some sort of concept going on here, it would be fine but it proceeds to “Revenge Is Done” which only tells me the band were watching V for Vendetta and suddenly thought “We should write a song about Guy Fawkes” and the rest of the bandmates agreed with the subpar idea. More useless sound clips such as the fanfare intro for “Winter Soldiers”, the Japanese voice from “Salvation” are heard and make you want them to stop with the stalling and get on with the music already, even if it’s all insipid.

The album finds itself to stretch out too much on the quantity of tracks. With fifteen in total, six of them are interlude fillers, although “The Awakening” could have easily merged with “My Endless Flight” since they seem to go together and don’t have a huge musical difference to each other. This album could have been condensed to a fair quantity of ten tracks which wouldn’t be argued with. Again, it’s not like they were following any sort of concept album for this release so there really was no need to have things bloated like this.

When Lightning Strikes only takes two steps from the days of Quest for Glory. After 14 years, it doesn’t seem Drakkar will ever achieve to offer a lot of capabilities to the power metal world. While there are some decent works from the guitars and even the vocals have the odd moment, there’s still far too much that can be done to make themselves better which is a path they never seem to have taken after so long. Once again, they make an album drawn out with a lot of unnecessary material to hear but at least it doesn’t feel as tedious as their debut album. Overall, it’s a slight step up from their debut album but that isn’t saying much.

Overall rating: 2/5 (Struck by mediocrity)

Release date: 6th January 2012
Website: Steelwing’s Facebook page
Label: Unsigned.

When seeing Blind Guardian live in London at Shepherd’s Bush Empire, they were accompanied with Steelwing for support act and they played a passionate show despite the venue having terrible sound settings. Their music and performance gave me enough confidence to pick up their debut album Lord of the Wasteland at the merchandise and the record proved to be full of fun throwbacks to the NWOBHM days and threw a few sweet melodies of their own, particularly with the closing track “Clash of the Two Tribes”. Two years later, we have their second album Zone of Alienation and despite initial doubts after hearing “Solar Wind Riders” and “Breathless”, the release turned out to be a fun experience overall and put my concerns to rest.

Although the opening track “2097 A.D.” can be an earache, it won’t take long to forget the instrumental track containing the awkward bass. Going through one catchy heavy metal track to another will make you forgive the rather alienating intro. Like Lord of the Wasteland, they go through some rapid fire heavy metal anthems such as “Full Speed Ahead!” which the pacing of the song feels enhanced by the simple but effective lyrics. Another great execution is the instrumental “They Came From the Skies” and if there was anything to reconsider the thought of this album being a huge step down from the first, it’s this 4 minutes of recklessness. I’m a sucker for instrumentals, particularly from NWOBHM bands and alike. Enforcer managed to write some aggressive instrumentals of their own and now Steelwing have taken their turn and this is the kind of instrumental work that will keep me pumped up when walking somewhere whilst listening to my iPod.

While the songs are mostly fast, there are a few times when the band must take a break. “Breathless” feels more hard rock than all the other tracks and “Lunacy Rising” gives you a bit of both and shows Steelwing’s faster form and lowering down to a slow pace for the second half. It’s not the most epic taste from the band’s capabilities and this does feel like one standard song taking to a further step but from what they’ve unleashed with a ten minute song, it’s impressive. They do return with stepping up the gears and Rockbag/Vega take one last shot with their twin guitar work before it all ends. Their efforts to write longer tracks must not stop here since they have many years ahead of themselves to write yet more great material like this. This band looks so youthful that I wouldn’t be surprised if I was older than most of them.

Riley returns with his high shrieking vocals that make him sound more enthusiastic than your average power metal vocalist. Those who aren’t fond of falsettos in heavy metal should stay clear but everyone else will have the opportunity to embrace the full force he puts into the music. His voice is as metallic as on the first record and there’s no stopping this man anytime soon. If there’s any contributors to the band that couldn’t be obvious enough with their enjoyment in the recording studio, it’s Robby Rockbag and Alex Vega on their guitars. There are far too many enjoyable solos to even count here but “Tokkotai (Wind of Fury)” has some furious notes struck mid-section going from one solo to another. While some riffs may give you a deja vu from other traditional metal variants, it’s hard to deny that these are very motivated to their representing songs. Infact, these riffs don’t hide the fact that Steelwing are Maiden worshipping but their attitude is like “We’re Maiden fanatics, deal with it while we play some damn catchy tunes on stage”.

One thing that can be a bothersome is the sound production for “Solar Wind Riders”. A song like that sounds too smooth and that tends to be one problem with modern sound productions. The demo bonus track “Hit ‘Em Hard” finds the right balance for its loudness and texture which would have benefited the overall surroundings of Zone of Alienation. The only other thing that doesn’t leave much impression to the listener is Oskar Åstedt on the drums. They feel very standard and don’t have much to get you excited for and lacks flexibility on the drumkit.

Zone of Alienation had me alienated at first but the extra terrestrial will be accustomed to with Steelwing giving the listener yet more magnificent works of traditional/power metal that continues from their debut release. With Riley on his top form with his vocals once again along with Rockbag/Vega being very busy with riffs and solos throughout, they will quickly abduct you into the record. Twice is lucky for Steelwing and hopefully the great catchy material from them does not end here.

Overall rating: 4/5 (Lord of the Wasteland lovers will not be alienated)