From the first glance at the cover featuring a man in a white shirt standing against a brick wall I thought this was some random CD that had got lost in the post and ended up with us. However, a look at the back revealed it to be from Painkiller Records. Strange. Further digging showed that Nick Douglas in fact plays bass for legendary metal babe Doro Pesch. That would explain it then. So is it pure heavy metal bass solos? Far from it. It’s actually radio friendly pop rock with a plethora of acoustic guitar ballads. Nick can sing reasonably well and the production is good but it won’t appeal to any metal fans or even to any indie fans. It’s just too soft and unexciting so I can’t recommend it unless you really have a thing for soft rock ballads.

Swedish death metal worship from Italy. Now usually I don’t like to put “sounds like …” type statements in reviews but in the case of a band purposely trying to emulate a style that has been created and honed by other bands for over ten years then its unavoidable. Think Indecent and Obscene era Dismember or early Entombed only not as good and you won’t be far off the mark. The clicky kick drums, over-distorted production and fat guitar sound with all the middle stripped out is faithfully reproduced and as such is good. Unfortunately, the same quality of heavy riffs and melodic leads is not, leaving this record fairly unremarkable.

A five track MCD of fast-paced and crunchy gore-splashed death metal. It won’t win any points on originality and there’s no leads or melody but it motors along nicely and old school gore metal fans will appreciate it. The production is nice and clear, laden with heavily distorted guitar, lashings of double-kick and oodles of monosyllabic grunting. It clocks in at 20 minutes and as such is just a taster of things to come from this band. There’s potential here but if you already have a load of gore metal albums these guys will have pull something more out of the bag on subsequent releases to attract interest.

Old School melodic black metal of the corpse paint variety. Trem picked guitars drive the songs with mid-paced melodies with keyboards only occurring for the creepy intros and occasional interlude. The vocals are a throaty snarl but its fairly easy to make out the lyrics. Topics covered include witches and lycantrophy. Tracks tend to start with an acoustic intro with a spooky whisper overlayed and this technique gets overused. Otherwise the dynamics aren’t bad with pace changes occurring fairly frequently. The album clocks in at just under an hour with 6 full length songs so some could definitely be trimmed down a bit. The production is quite trebly but not hissy and is mixed quite well although the bass and kick drums are fairly low in the mix. Despite this, the sound is good and not harsh on the ear. Overall, its not bad but I can think of a good few other albums that it sounds like and it could do with something to make it a little more different.

These Portuguese metallers have been around a long time (since ’93) but have only produced self-released demos so far. This is a five track demo with a nicely put together booklet and the whole package is available for download from their official site. Four of the tracks are fast-paced, guitar-driven black metal although with more deathish vocals interspersed with occasional spoken sound clips (Stephen Hawking at one point) covering standard black metal topics of war, dark enchantresses etc. There are subtle keyboard layers on most parts. The other track is old-school death metal with lots of blast beats. Its all competently played and the production mix is pretty good but it doesn’t really stand out from the crowd and could do with more tempo variation.