The Grotesquery: Tales of the Coffin Born

89%.
During this old school death metal renaissance we are enjoying at present, a lot of Razorback signings and similiar acts seem to have been doing too little to last past fleeting nostalgia. The Grotesquery have finally taken up the torch for taking it all past musical imitation and thematic parody. They are essentially Bone Gnawer (Rogga and Kam are both here) with a lot more class, and more thought gone into the music being created.

Firstly, the concept album is a self-indulgent gimmick, and does not intrude upon the actual songs aside from short sections of narration between them. The lyrical concept is a sort of Wes Craven-esque rendering of Edgar Allan Poe's 'The Fall of the House of Usher' short story, and is communicated with good taste and effective pacing. This story spans twenty years, and in a way, so does the music.

The core old school sound so popular at the moment shares its dank cave with a sharp pylon of death metal modernity. Typical scrawling, edgy riffs and familiar slow, pounding passages are offset by a measure of brutality, manifesting in the form of a modern thrash influence with an edge of grooviness. 'This Morbid Child' is a highlight, with a violent, scissoring chug and the most headbanging breakdown I've had the pleasure of for far too long. The weighty, lumbering riffs of 'Nightmares Made Flesh' feel heavy enough to drop through concrete floors. 'Sins of His Father' breaks out the classic styles, with a rattling thrash-based riff that shares the song with more dark and deadly doom. The production sound is throaty and heavy, but with plenty of the acerbic clarity needed to accentuate the more recent influences.

Technically things are more complex than influences like Carnage or Grave, and certainly more than Bone Gnawer and Revolting and such, more in the realm of Bloodbath while retaining the old school authenticity through being less reliant on blastbeats and more inclined toward slow and gory drum rolls underneath the staggering tremolo wails. The bass guitar is delightfully unchecked, seeming to organically ramble and groan across the tracks as if improvised during the recording process.

Having Kam Lee do the vocals was a wise choice, as Rogga's, while effective, are just a little too homogenous to get me excited. Kam is the perfect voice for the demented character represented in the lyrics. His performance ranges from cavernously deep growls to evil rasps, occasionally with an echoing effect, as if he is roaring from a crypt out into the cold night air. Only on 'Spirits of the Dead' do things edge a little too far into modern territory, with half-shouted vocals accompanying the simplistic slam riffs. His low, sepulchral gurgles on 'Coffin Birth' and 'Nightmares Made Flesh' ("hhhhhrrrrrr....") and habit of continuously rasping over the instrumental breaks make up for it however.

The old geezers who are The Grotesquery have managed, between them, to create a well-crafted, well-written behemoth of refreshingly vigorous death metal. The songs vary enough in length and mood to make the album a very rewarding listen. While opener 'Coffin Birth' is a straightforward old school boxing of the ears, 'The Terrible Old Man' is a genuinely sinister mid-paced monster replete with eerie guitar pinches and maniacal laughter. 'Sepulcher Macabre' and 'The Fall of the House of Grotesque' are both excellently realized dark, deathly epics, with particularly the latter featuring some chilling guitar work. Where Bone Gnawer was derivative and moronic, Tales of the Coffin Born is inspired and vicious. The old dogs learned some new tricks.

Saint Vitus: Born Too Late

95%.
This lurid item saw the introduction of Wino as vocalist, and the cementing of a cohesive traditional doom sound after the unfettered and wandering rhythms of sophomore Hallow's Victim. It also, cleverly, provided an instant sense of identity for its audience: they were "born too late", as anachronistically superior in their musical tastes as their heroes in Saint Vitus. The proud race of trad-doom loyalists was born.

Born Too Late almost completely avoids Hallow's Victim's propensity for fast pacing and punky rock'n'roll song structures, adjusting the speed to the lumbering walk of tracks like 'The Psychopath' and 'Mystic Lady' with an emphasis on deep, prominent bass playing to accentuate the methodical plod. Chandler shows his skill as a simple but very proficient guitarist, breaking off seemingly endless courses of crawling distorted doom riffs. The closer 'The War Starter' is a powerful, trampling epic of forceful doom metal and along with the title track is the album's finest moment.

The doom sound is richer, as it is what the band are focussing on. This is helped by the best production on a Vitus album yet, with meaty, thumping drums and far more expressiveness in the guitar sound. The songs are more engrossing and hypnotic, a trait of stoner doom. The emphasis on repetition and warm, enveloping bass is there, while Chandler's excellent guitar solos reach for the bluesy origins of Black Sabbath. If you have heard much doom metal, prepare to not be surprised; this is a moment in time that helped solidify the almost-there components of the genre, and where influences of Black Flag and other pre-'70s outfits fell into the outskirts of the Saint's sound.

Vitus moved away from the occult and zombies, with Wino's more identifiable themes of alcoholism, substance abuse and isolationism dominating as opposed to stories of zombies and occult references. The title track's mournful paean to our downtrodden subculture is like Saxon's culture-anthem 'Denim & Leather' for doom heads. It's definitive, heavy and rumbling doom. He is clearly a more technically skilled singer than Scott Reagers, with an admittedly stronger Ozzy Osbourne influence. He can sound as menacing as he can vulnerable and on the brink of insanity, a combination that would become favoured by vocalists like Messiah Marcolin and Robert Lowe.

This is a huge cultural bench mark, capturing the dichotomies essential to heavy metal subculture; proud, yet ostracized, possessing of a more incisive approach to music ("they say my songs are way too slow/ but they don't know the things I know") and occasionally a bit laissez-faire about hygiene ("I have things living in my hair"). It is also a rock-solid reference point for doom metal, and ever since bands have found it very hard to go wrong when returning to the straightforward approach of Born Too Late.

Vader: Necropolis

64%.
I have every Vader album. I also have every Vader EP, and their 25-year anniversary rerecordings package XXV. I guess that makes me a complete Vader fag, and an unashamed one at that. Despite a boring couple of albums at the turn of the century, mid-noughties Vader sounded as strong as they had on De Profundis. Then everyone left or got fired, so Piotr Wiwczarek is back with a new band, consisting of himself and drummer Paweł Jaroszewicz.

Piotr's compatriots in frenzied Polish death thrash played a part in the band's long-running success. Jaroszewicz really can't cut the mustard compared to Doc or Daray, but to be fair he had massive shoes to fill from those two. He is serviceable. Outside of him, Piotr handles all the guitars and bass himself. He is a proven axeman and generally keeps his tried and true recipe for jagged, thrashed up riffs and buzzing tremolo workouts feeling fresh. Where Necropolis falters is in the song ideas.

Basically, Vader are all over the shop with this one. This is a shame as Vader break off some of their most convincing and most thrash-influenced material for a few years here. The biting chug of 'Devilizer' is a bracing start to Necropolis, challenging the aforementioned Vader fag with a grooved-out thrashing equivalent to the mid-paced menace of Impressions in Blood. 'Dark Heart' has a similiar appeal, with its rolling riffs and explosion into a monstrous thrash solo, while 'We Are the Horde' plays with some of the structural experiments, chopping and changing of Impressions in Blood.

This Necropolis seems to be true to its name however - the city of the dead has a few stiffs in it. 'Never Say My Name' and 'Blast' are simply too one-dimensional to be in such prime places on the tracklist or even really merit inclusion on such a short album, and the same goes for 'Anger' - a two minute song that seems to go on for far too long. Oh dear. The interludes that pepper the album are also a bit annoying: 'The Seal' is much too long at two minutes of random electronic warbling noise and 'Summoning The Futura' causes the same rage.

Including a couple of old-fashioned death doom style songs in 'Impure' and 'When the Sun Drowns in Dark' was a nice idea however, and they suggest that with a little more care taken this album could have seemed healthily diverse instead of messy round the edges. 'When the Sun Drowns in Dark' especially is a good bit of stoner death, with a groovy, rocking riff. Annoyingly it ends with several minutes of silence and then another strange noise. This is a pet hate. Why would I sit, like a moron, listening to nothing, in anticipation of someone jamming their finger on a synthesizer? If I don't want to listen to anything, I'll turn your CD off my damn self, sirs.

The album begins and ends very strong, and even has a really good couple of songs in the middle, but between this there is a lot of fat. The lineup problems really show - it's as if, left with total creative control, Piotr tried to do a little too much too soon and hurriedly record it after intense touring. Since there are five or six fantastic songs here, perhaps this should have been another Vader EP.

Saint Vitus: The Walking Dead

74%.
In the original Reagers days, Saint Vitus did two things very well. Catchy, crunchy traditional heavy metal songs that sounded grimy and down-tuned enough to be doom, and huge viscous epics too bloody stoned and slow to be anything but doom. This EP has one of each, as well as one of the best cuts from Hallow's Victim.

'Darkness' should have been on that album. The verse riff is almost Venom-like in its whirring, tripping attack, the drumming of Armando Acosta has become highly sophisticated and damn exciting to boot, and overall it's a potent and headstrong shot of NWOBHM knocked quickly back and slammed on the bar. 'White Stallions', as featured on the aforementioned full-length, was a diamond there but doesn't really add much to this EP for those with access to Hallow's Victim. In fact, seated between these two gems it doesn't look quite so shiny.

'The Walking Dead' might be the most ambitious thing attempted during Reagers' first tenure in the band, and is their longest song. The fact it is imprisoned on a rare 12" and on the web is a bit of a bitch as it deserves a more central place in the mythology of early Vitus. Reagers' vocals are typically ludicrous (and great), howling and lamenting shrilly above the strangled, intermittent drone of Chandler's very simple riffs. It's about as grim and depressive as they got in this era and sets a standard for long, slow doom songs in the following decade, from all sorts of bands. Even the guitar solo is a harsh screech, far from the usual flamboyant pedaling. Huge, majestic, pretty terrifying and must-hear material for the Vitusian.

With the band having reformed recently, one can hope that Hallow's Victim might see the light of day as a CD at some point with the two exclusive tracks here added. This EP was seemingly not just a release schedule filler, but an exercise in stretching creative capabilities in two different directions and scoring perfect marks. I can't really score it very high as it features one unnecessary track, but the other two are worth tracking down to add to your very old school and true collection of doom mp3s.

Saint Vitus: Hallow's Victim

79%.
The second album by those bastards in Saint Vitus is not actually available. Not widely, anyway. Bastards. They are condemning their fans. There are bootlegged CDs on the shelves of a couple hundred dingy bedrooms around the world, but outside of that and whatever remaining wax versions there are, you're fucked. You will have to commit that most heinous of crimes, that odious manifestation of all that is impatient and ungrateful about society, and download it from the wretched hive of scum and villainy known as the internet. People have hanged for less. Should you risk your eternal soul for the music here?

Hallow's Victim sits between the debut and Born Too Late as an incongruously energetic and balls-out bit of Black Sabbath via Black Flag. Black Flabbath. 'War is Our Destiny' is a more streamlined, anthemic opener than the raw dirtiness of 'Saint Vitus.' The riffs are catchy and thunderous and the chorus is big and powerful. Interesting backpedaling there. Chandler's guitar tone is a bit...bouncier. 'White Stallions' certainly has a nice racing groove to it.

Unlike the debut which started at full throttle and gradually lost steam towards the epic doom climax, Hallow's Victim lurches back and forth in its pacing. There are also a couple more fast songs than before; not a bad thing, the Saint write NWOBHM-doom hybrids to put Witchfinder General to shame. 'Mystic Lady' is where they finally get round to the main course though, and it's a bloody standout in their discography. A slow and big-assed rolling riff, groaning into a sublime fast climax with one of Chandler's most respectable solos. One of the best things they recorded, with or without Reagers, a classic of '80s doom.

'Just Friends (Empty Love)' is suspiciously like 'Children of the Grave' in terms of riffy there, and as it is Hallow's Victim's mid-paced selection and the penultimate cut on the record it is partly responsible for something of a sizzling out. The thrashing title track seems a little underdeveloped, even if it is quite fun, and the album itself just seems unfinished in places. However, Reagers puts in a mightily diverse set of performances for his last full album with Saint Vitus for a decade, and Chandler's mastery of riffs and wah-assisted solos is enough make up for the dips in quality and to clinch the deal.

It can't match up to the original, not quite, but it's well worth paying the ultimate price to download it. Worth it for 'Mystic Lady' alone. At least when you get to hell, there is a good chance Satan will be learning the guitar solo from 'White Stallions' while watching Blackadder II. If you're going there, it probably helps to have a common interest with hell's human resources manager.

Saint Vitus: Saint Vitus

91%.
This album basically took the rocking influence of Black Flag, killed it and brought it back to life as a shambling zombie of doom draped in the dark cape of Black Sabbath. True to the simple concept behind their debut, they do this in patient easy to follow steps. Each track slows more and more towards a slow as hell finish. The bass slowly rises to the same level as the guitar in importance. Scott Reagers sounds more and more mental. David Chandler's guitar tone seems progressively more like a huge yawning mouth ready to swallow you.

The title track represents a song like, say, 'My War' by Black Flag shortly after death, about recognizable but the punky fire has been replaced by the deathly glaze of doom. The riffs are a subterranean mumble, the drums a rattling gallop, and as the corpse of '70s hard rock and punk begins to kick up a bit of a whiff we go to 'White Magic/ Black Magic', where what would resurrect as the proud visage of stoner doom found its wah-pedaled and smoky grooves coming together for the first of many times.

Reaching the ghastly centrepiece, the carcass has risen from the cold steel table where the organs of rock were being lifted stinking into a cold white light, and has begun to wander around looking peckish. 'Zombie Hunger', yeah. Scott Reagers makes his strongest bid to outstrip Wino as my favourite Vitus vocalist here, and I often feel he might be. Drunkenly and disjointedly bawling "I'm a zombie! I inside have died...into the grave!' he represents everything that is great about this album - intoxicated, unhinged, swaying dangerously forth with the classic driving riff of the song. It's less like a riff than a repeated throb of guitar feedback supported by Armando Acosta's ambling drum patterns, and at this point what used to be rock music has become something new and ancient-sounding.

With a precedent set for slower pacing, 'The Psychopath' and 'Buried at Sea' (excepting the vehement explosion in the middle of the latter) get even more incremental in their speed. These tracks represents the body I have post-mortemed reaching its final stage of decomposition, where the corporeal elements of rock and metal have been so altered and degraded as to become something new and mighty, inching onwards with the calm uncomplicated menace associated with the genre Sabbath had created and Vitus helped mould, and mouldy this is.

This is an album that got a lot done, with a seemingly modest amount of ambition. It's hard to decide whether it's even original at all, but what makes it so goddamn important is the fact that it defines itself. It seems to present the crystallization process that had occurred, with fast and rocking guitar music being hypnotically distilled into the elegant purity of possibly my favourite four letter word, DOOM.

Iron Maiden: Brave New World

99%.

Blaze Bayley's tenure in Iron Maiden is often seen as something of a low point for the band, both vocally and compositionally. Although the two albums he recorded with the band were undeniably flawed, they did have a few moments of excellence and these innovations were not discarded with the return of Bruce Dickinson to the fold. With Brave New World, the band make no attempt to reset their sound to the hook-driven immediacy of the early '80s, or worse, the directionless rock pandering of No Prayer For The Dying and (most of) Fear of the Dark). Instead, the reunited writing team of Dickinson, Harris, Murray and Smith, now aided by Janick Gers, staged a triumphant expansion of the progression hinted at on The X Factor and Virtual XI, with flavours of Somewhere In Time and Seventh Son.

The result is probably my third favourite Maiden album after the last two I mentioned, as well as the pinnacle of Maiden's 21st century renaissance. The album constantly returns to the themes of travel and creating/ finding new identities, but occasionally becomes more specific in its references to the Aldous Huxley novel it takes its name from - aside from the title track, 'Dream Of Mirrors' seems to be a critique of the concept of sleep-learning. 'Blood Brothers' meanwhile is more than a romantic paean to universal brotherhood, and could easily be a glance at Emile Zola's Etienne Lantier, who 'laughed at his earlier idealism, his schoolboy vision of a brave new world in which justice would reign and men would be brothers.' With that quote in mind, the song's lyrics take on a distinctly more serious tone, though not entirely despairing.

While I usually ignore lyrical content in my reviews, the above is key to the album; Dickinson was putting more thought into his lyrics than ever before, and the stories told are one element of a more considered and cohesive approach to writing an album. The album is lovingly crafted, based around melodies that favour atmosphere and a grandiose pomp over the straight for the throat catchy riffs and leads of old. Even the swift opener 'The Wicker Man' with its exultant guitar curls and empowering chorus chant is hardly humming material, with more focus on technicality and scale. Its evil brother, 'The Mercenary' is an instant Maiden classic with a gritty do-or-die message, an anthemic chorus and a mean attitude. It would have made a good opener to the album, but also serves well as a shot of adrenalin to the heart amidst the beauteous extravagance of 'Blood Brothers' and 'Dream Of Mirrors.'

The album is also a lot heavier than the two previous ones, in part due to Janick Gers having stayed on with the return of Adrian Smith. Together with Dave Murray they provide an exceedingly tasty platter of urgent riffs that rock harder and heavier than 'Futureal' and such, crunching power chords during the choruses and heroic leads that sail over Nicko's characteristic gallops and tumbling fills. Not to mention a wealth of solos that range from Smith's carefully designed classical pieces to Gers' more forceful, freeform bursts.

The early part of the album is mostly comprised of three semi-epic songs that build from clean, melodic guitar sections into heavier riffing and anthemic vocal lines that return to the opening melodies. 'Ghost Of The Navigator', the title track, and 'Blood Brothers' vary in pacing and scale but are all very beautiful in their own way, setting dark and heavy sections against anthemic bridges and emotional performances from The Air Raid Siren, who still lives up to that moniker despite often using a softer and more regulated style. 'Brave New World' is among my favourites on this album, often making me a little emotional although I'm not quite sure why. There's no denying however that the chorus, simply repeating the title, is a moment of chest-beating exuberance and emotion for both the singer and the listener. Classic stuff, this.

If this is to be called a progressive metal album, and to me it does not pretend to any genre but is rather a natural growth of Maiden's natural leanings toward the grand and evocative, but if it is then a song like 'Out Of The Silent Planet' is an example of how progressive should be done. It is very simply constructed and revolves around the repeated lines 'out of the silent planet, out of the silent planet we are' and 'out of the silent planet, dreams of devastation, out of the silent planet, come the demons of creation.' Even at over six minutes it seems one of the catchiest and easiest songs on here, and is a good argument for simplicity over pointless progressive widdling. 'The Thin Line Between Love And Hate' is a funny way to end the album, shedding the contemplative nature of the bulk of Brave New World for an upbeat and power metal inspired charge to the finish. By funny, I don't mean to complain - its movement into a tranquil and smooth outro, almost reminiscent of Anathema's Eternity album, is sublime, and it is always healthy for an album to end with something unexpected rather than have all cannons fired before the grand finale.

With Virtual XI, Iron Maiden had moved away from the flamboyantly progressive and unpredictable compositional diversity of epics like 'Seventh Son Of A Seventh Son' and 'Sign Of The Cross' (which were built on the freeform climbing structure of 'Hallowed Be Thy Name') toward the era of repetitive Iron Maiden epics. Much like 'The Clansman' and 'The Angel And The Gambler', 'Dream Of Mirrors' and 'The Nomad' are more slowed down, expanded and enriched than other songs on the album, while being characterized by central motifs that are returned to instead of discarded for other things. Choruses and other repeated vocal parts are a focus, but with plenty of allowance made for instrumental rambling and building atmospheres. The reason these pieces are so successfully enthralling is the fact that each makes itself known for its content rather than its length, never feeling as if they are eight or nine minutes for the sake of being epic and progressive.

Although Blaze's career in Iron Maiden was ultimately ill-fated, it gave Dickinson the time to explore a few other musical territories, to eventually fall back in love with metal, and to return to an Iron Maiden rejuvenated with more passion and creativity than it had benefited from for twelve years. The meanderings of '90s Maiden had also set the foundations for a new and more matured sound, exhibited with surpassing excellence on this album. There is not a single track on here I feel could have been left off, or abridged or changed in any way. The brilliance of the album is that ideas are allowed to run their full course no matter how long it takes, and it is a richer and better experience for it.

As for Bruce, in the words of Nicko as the album fades, 'Aah, I fuckin' missed 'im!'