Monday, June 20, 2011

Album Review: Beastwars - Beastwars



Over the past few months a New Zealand band by the name of Beast Wars has been making a name for themselves in Wellington (welly reprazent) now finally we have an album and what has been produced here is a piece of heavy as fuck metal that isn't boring or your average metal album.

Now one thing that you'll definitely notice when listen to this is that of the vocalist, he has such a strong yet filthy sounding voice and reminds me of Lemmy and even Neil Fallon to a lesser extent. The opening track Damn The Sky introduces the album so well, such crunching guitar work before the vocal come in almost soft and tame until they explode out during the chorus to show the true talents he has with the mic.

One thing I also notice is how far back in the mix the drums are, not always the most normal of things but the drums on this albums are probably the least interesting part of this album and merely backing up the heavy guitar are strength of voice. The vocals on this album are the strongest part of this album and show his full range and abilities from the soft/tame vocals to the strong highs on Damn The Sky, we have more casual and even spoken bits on Lake Of Fire that go great with his screams on this song.

The guitars change it up song from song, a lot of nice interesting riffs have been incorporated to keep it from being samey, a lot of ideas have been put into this album. Heavy, chunky, fast riffs on one song to the slower much more subtle guitar work on others. This might be down to an older bunch of musicians as opposed to the young play as fast as you can sing as loud and high as you can attitude we get in a lot of debut releases.

My favourite track on the album is Iron Wolf, a stripped back simpler song on this album, the vocals sadder than on any other song. The vocals meander through the versus' before exploding through the chorus' to give it great contrast through the song. The song isn't as METAL \m/ as most of the other songs and seems pretty hard rock at times but as the song get past the half way mark it becomes much more of a strong metal song and the best on the album.

My only real problems are at times the lyrics are unrecognisable, this isn't a huge problem to be fair because the vocals that are incorporated at times are supposed to be really dirty and unclear. Not to mention with the guitars being so strong in the mix they can of course make this even further unclear. Also the drums are incredibly boring, I'm not looking for some virtuoso performance but something a little more interesting to not seem like a boring feature.

Overall this is a great release, the vocals are really great, the guitars and bass are also great features in this album which has produce some great metal from New Zealand. Particularly when New Zealand has a habit of hyping metal bands that are not only shit, but incredibly uninteresting within the NZ metal community.

Overall Rating: 8/10

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