I have a lot of time for a guy like
Blaze Bayley, someone who speaks from the heart, who writes the music he loves and performs it with a passion unsullied (or indeed, perhaps reinforced) by all of the personal difficulties he has had to overcome.
Blaze Bayley's latest release
Promise And Terror picks up directly from where 2008's superb The Man Who Would Not
Die left off.
Blaze has managed to keep his cast of terrific musicians from that album intact and it's obvious that each and every one of them shares the same vision of the bands music.
Since the bands previous effort made number two on my top albums of 2008 list (check it out
here) I had rather high hopes for the follow up. Opener
Watching The Night Sky contains all those key factors that made all
Blaze's post Maiden solo albums so enjoyable. It's got pace, power, heart and of course the impassioned vocals of the main man himself.
The bands sound is unique and at the same time a gloriously familiar one, a mix of straight up galloping heavy metal, with twin guitars and solo's aplenty, the occasional hint of thrash plus some slower moments of reflection.
It's the production of the record that holds that unifying feeling between not only itself and The Man Who Would Not
Die but also the three records produced by the previous incarnation of
Blaze. The whole thing is much heavier than your standard traditional heavy metal album, with a deep bottom end provided by David Bermudez bass playing and Larry Paterson's crushing drumming.
This deep sound suits
Blaze's style of singing down to the ground as he performs on a lower register than your ordinary traditional metal singer.
The guitar playing of Nicolas Bermudez (David's brother) and Jay Walsh is never gaudy with lots of palm muted riffs and power chords being the order of the day. But this hard riffing attitude is exactly what the band need to meld with the power coming from the rhythm section. Plus don't be fooled, these guys know their way round a double guitar harmony or rapid fire solo when the moment is right to strike.
The lyrics on this album will be instantly recognisable to anyone who has even just a passing knowledge of
Blaze's not inconsiderable body of work (now on his tenth studio album and counting). He sings of internal struggles, the misery and drudgery caused by living in everyday society and the horror and damned futility of war. These sometimes bleak, often uplifting messages perfectly match the weighty sound of the music.
Two of the albums finest tracks are the back to back pairing of
City Of Bones and
Faceless. Both are classic pieces of heavy metal defiance, the former being influenced by the siege of Leningrad during World War Two and has a strong militaristic feel running through it. The latter rails against the status quo in society and certainly gets the blood pumping as we are advised
"If you think your beaten, you will be beaten down". Blaze has always sought to convey very clear and personal ideas through his lyrics. And indeed, the lyrics on the albums last four tracks are all thematically linked together. The idea is the begging of the questions "How does someone know they are truly alive?".
The first of these four
Surrounded By Sadness starts out as an acoustic lament, with
Blaze going for a very bizarre pronunciation of "surrounding" during the chorus ("soorounding", apparently) before the heavy guitars come in just after two and a half minutes for some crashing chords.
This leads straight into the next track, the excellent
The Trace of Things That Have No Words, the one finds our man extolling the fact that
"These scars prove my life was real" to an up-tempo beat. This yet again segues seamlessly into the next song
Letting Go Of The World. This track is classic
Blaze, starting mid-paced with some alternately crunching/melodic riffs melding with his theatrical vocals, only to increase the tempo mid way through for some prime headbanging action. It is sadly landed with a very awkward lyrical passage towards the end (you will know it when you hear it).
Last track of the suite and indeed of the album is
Comfortable In Darkness, this rounds of the album by suggesting that perhaps we will never learn the answers to all our questions, but as long as we can feel at one with ourselves we will endure. It makes an almost melancholic end to the album, which strangely enough perfectly suits it.
As much as I enjoyed Promise And Terror I can't help feel that after such a breakthrough on the last release the band have been comfortable to follow the formula that made The Man Who Would Not
Die so enjoyable.
This is a double edged sword as despite the fact that Promise And Terror is a fine album which should be purchase without hesitation, I was hoping for the next evolutionary steps from the band. Its one of those records which does suffer slightly in comparison to its predecessor.
Perhaps now that
Blaze has thankfully gathered together what seems a settled, solid, like-minded group of metal musicians, they can push forward together and create something very special indeed.
Written by
Stuart Wednesday, March 17, 2010
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