In the before times, I enjoyed a band called Airbourne. I’m pretty sure they were Australian, and they sounded remarkably like AC/DC. Highly recommended. So, on the list of available albums, I saw Airborn‘s Lizard Secrets Part 3: Utopia (Fighter Records) and figured I’d give it a shot. Very glad I did. This Italian group delivers a Power Metal tour de force. Bonus, the vocals pitch up in a range most of us can reach.
Many times in music journalism, we writers are given to hyperbole, often because it is the low hanging fruit of the field to gush about the classics with a torrent of compliments. You often read words like genre-defying, and frankly, a lot of the time they don’t land as they are meant to. However, in the case of the entire career of Fear Factory and certainty of the album Demanufacture (Roadrunner Records), the words can never do proper justice to the music. Simply stated, Deamnfacture is one of the most important, unique, and unapologetically brutal albums in heavy metal history. Continue reading
When they toured with Palestinian act Khalas a few years ago, Orphaned Land‘s Israeli frontman, Kobi Farhi would joke on stage every night about how, considering the two bands were from two Middle Eastern countries divided by a brutal and long-standing conflict, the only time they would actually argue with each other was over whose turn it was to buy the beer. Continue reading