Dantesco at myspace

Dantesco, Puerto Rico’s premier metal band play a form of epic doom metal not a million miles from Doomsword, Solstice and Solitude Aeturnus. The first thing you will notice is they are all in Spanish and that vocalist Erico La Bestia sings for a good portion of the time in a cod-operatic style that somewhat distracts from the music. It’s hard to get into any sort of metal with someone sounding like Pavarotti singing over the top of it. The performance and composing of the music is top notch, but it’s impossible to get past a vocalist who by rights should be singing in an Andrew Lloyd Webber musical and it’s not coincidence that the bonus track on this album is actually taken from one!

The guitarwork is immensely soulful and provocative and with another vocalist I could probably get into this a lot more, but La Bestia’s vocals which when they aren’t operatic, sound like a parrot attempting falsetto, simply don’t work in Metal. Operatic vocals are for opera and nothing else really by the evidence of this record.

Dio at Myspace

The trend of bands performing entire albums in concert seems to be pretty popular these days (I have Jethro Tull’s “Aqualung Live” and 2 out of 3 of Dream Theater’s “Official Bootleg” series), and Dio continues it with this 2-disc set where every song from “Holy Diver” is performed.

Dio’s voice has its ups and downs. He’s awfully hoarse on some songs on the first disc (the title track especially), but he’s awesome on others (especially when you remember he’s over 60. The band is in fine form throughout, with “Gypsy” and “Shame on the Night” containing drum and guitar solos, respectively, which are lengthy but remain interesting throughout. Disc 2 was my favorite part; it contains two songs from Dio’s sophomore effort “The Last in Line”, as well as covers from his stints with Rainbow and Black Sabbath. Another part I enjoyed was the end of the song “Gypsy” after the drum solo; a pre-recorded version of Holst’s “Jupiter, the Bringer of Jollity” bursts out and the drummer plays along with it. It has to be one of the silliest moments in metal that I’ve ever experienced, but I love silliness in metal so it’s all fine with me. This wouldn’t be the best place to start with Dio (stick to the original Holy Diver for that), but fans of his work will enjoy this album.

Ozzy Osbourne at Myspace

This album’s a guilty pleasure for me. It’s billed as live but clearly heavily overdone in the studio, as the contrast between Ozzy’s drunken rambling and his vocals in the songs themselves is obvious. But still, I enjoy it. Ozzy doesn’t perform any of his solo material, but sticks to songs he performed in Black Sabbath exclusively. Apparently, this album was released in order to compete with the Dio-era Sabbath album “Live Evil”. Randy Rhoads had just died, so he isn’t on this, and he was replaced by Brad Gillis, who would become famous with the AOR band Night Ranger, and he’s really no replacement for either Rhoads or Tony Iommi.

So why do I like this album? For one thing, the bass is awesome. Rudy Sarzo of Quiet Riot and Whitesnake plays on this album, and it makes me wonder why he was wasting his time with those lame pop metal bands, as he’s awesome here with his fuzzy bass tone. But my favorite part of the album is Ozzy’s between-song banter. He is just gloriously drunk, and I kept cracking up over his cries of “LOWDAH! LOWDAH!”, him falsely taking credit for writing the song “Black Sabbath” and yelling “KEEP ON SMOKIN’ IT!” at the end of “Sweet Leaf”. Although I enjoy this album, I can’t really recommend it, but die-hard Sabbath and Ozzy fans might want to check it out.

NOTE: This album is no longer being produced, so check used CD stores or download it on iTunes if you want it. Also, it should be noted that early CD pressings are missing “Sweet Leaf”.

Manowar at Myspace

Manowar’s most recent studio album is a mixed bag. For one, there are far too many synths, with some tracks having virtually no metal content at all. This makes Manowar sound like a limp-wristed fairy power metal band like Rhapsody, instead of the oiled-up and insanely muscled metal band we’ve all come to love. There’s fairly little narrative for a concept album; most of the lyrics are fairly generic stuff about Norse mythology. Also, there are few hilariously cheesy lines like “may your sword stay wet like a young girl in her prime.” Another problem is that there’s way too much narration, which is as uninspired as the lyrics (an exception is at the end of the excellent track “Sons of Odin”).

The album’s low point is definitely “Glory, Majesty, Unity.” A filler track with virtually no music, this track also has narration by a completely different person than the rest of the album. After a few listens, it dawned on me that the narrator was the one from “The Warrior’s Prayer” from Kings of Metal, an album that was nearly 20 years old when this was recorded! I have no idea why they didn’t re-record it with the new narrator.

The album isn’t entirely bad, though; strong tracks include the aforementioned “Sons of Odin,” as well as “Hymn of the Immortal Warriors” and the bonus track “Die for Metal” (the only non-Viking related song on the album, with typical Manowar lyrics, although the main riff is a little to close to Led Zeppelin’s “Kashmir” for my tastes). In my opinion, this would’ve been better off if they’d done what they did with their earlier half-hour track “Achilles: Agony and Ecstasy in Eight Parts” and made one very long song with this album’s material, cut the filler out, and filled out the rest of the album with unrelated tracks.

The Freezing Fog at Myspace

One would not expect that a traditional heavy metal album would come from the same plectrums of the same people who gave you Converge-approved metalcore heroes Beecher, despite the fact that Beecher themselves were originally conceived as a doom metal band, but rest assured if you absolutely hate metalcore (if you don’t then check out Beecher’s “This Elegy, His Autopsy”) you’ll probably be interested to check this out. Apart from the mark of mid-period Cathedral, there’s not a single influence that’s later than 1976. The riffs of Sabbath, the twin guitar attacks of Thin Lizzy, the stomp of Budgie, the genius of Deep Purple, the muddy power of Blue Cheer, the progressive bent of Hawkwind yadda yadda yadda. Basically this is the sound of heavy metal before Judas Priest and Motorhead got their hands on it, revisited through a stoner prism.

The lead guitar work by one “Charles Edward Godby” (like Beecher they insist on using their middle names in the time honoured serial killer fashion) shows an immense sense of power and rhythm, as vast riffage collides with soulful and psychedelic leads. The songs are expertly structured with many different variations on 70’s heavy metal ebbing and flowing in a natural and delightful fashion with the spacey Jimmy Page meets Kyuss solos being an obvious highlight. David William Hopkinson’s soaring masculine yet distinctly Lancastrian vocals bring a passionate and forceful resonance to the music, somewhere between a lower pitched version of Budgie’s Burke Shelley and a hell of a lot more tuneful Lee Dorrian!

This is the perfect album for chilling out, drinking a few beers and smoking the odd joint (a subject visited by the band themselves in their stoner hobbit epic “No Light, No Smoke”) to on a summer’s day. If this band had been around in 1974 they would have been legends, as it is in 2008 it’s a godamn awesome piece of trad metal heavier than fiat punto full of hambeasts, with not a growl, scream, or a trace of punk rock in sight. Although released in the United Kingdom by Roadkill records late last year, this record is being re-released worldwide in August this year by Dental records with 2 bonus tracks, so I would take some marks off for some Roadrunner-esque tactics there, but it’s hard to stay mad at these stoners for long with such quality guitar work on display.