May 2020 The Guardians Feature Release

For what will be my final offering into the feature releases as I exit The Guardians Clan I have chosen Ambush's debut full-length Firestorm from 2014.  The Swedes have a penchant for delivering some top notch heavy metal and this offering combines the best elements of speed metal and traditional heavy metal nicely for me.

https://metal.academy/releases/18211

I hadn't heard much about Swedish heavy/speed metallers Ambush coming into their 2014 debut album "Firestorm" so I didn't have too many expectations although the obviously retro cover artwork & band logo certainly gave me a hint of what was in store. My first listen was a little tainted by the fact that I popped the record on immediately after listening to Japanese thrashers Ritual Carnage who are obviously a lot more extreme & are also far closer to my musical comfort zone which left "Firestorm" sounding very tame indeed by comparison. A couple of additional spins saw me shedding those initial impressions & finding myself in a better position to treat the album on its merit & I ended up quite enjoying "Firestorm" although it's very hard to ignore the fact that if you didn't know any better you'd swear it was 1978-1982 period Judas Priest. I mean I've rarely heard a more accurate emulation of a band's sound & I feel that there's very little doubt that this was the ambition here. Ambush's sound is perfectly constructed for the task though as they've got that authentic early 80's guitar tone down pat & leave plenty of space in the accessible song structures in order to enhance the melodic hooks & well constructed song structures. Front man Oskar Jacobsson has really spun me out because he's nailed absolutely every nuance of Rob Halford's delivery here. In fact, even Rob's own mother wouldn't know it wasn't him in all honesty.

The tracklisting starts off very nicely with four strong efforts but it does threaten to lose steam through the middle with a couple of flat cowbell-driven choruses hinting at commercial hard rock (see "Close My Eyes" & "Molotov Cocktail"). Thankfully Ambush manage to pick it up again fairly quickly before dropping the ball again with comfortably the weakest track on the album in the very ordinary closer "Natural Born Killers" but overall there's enough high quality heavy metal here to keep me interested, particularly the two highlight tracks in the very "Exciter"-esque opener "Firestorm" & the dark & brooding "Master Of Pain" (my personal favourite). For those of you looking for speed metal, I wouldn't get your hopes up because Accept-worshipping "Don't Shoot (Let' Em Burn)" is really the only genuine example of that sound included here & I'd encourage you all to vote that genre tag down on the release page. I'm afraid the modern metal scene seems to have a very hard time understanding how to identify speed metal with far too many people throwing the label at anything with palm-muted tremolo-picking. I agree with Vinny's review statements about the lead guitar work as it's always welcome but isn't utilized as often as I would like. I'd also suggest that a shreddier modern approach would have been nice there too rather than simply trying to emulate a more restrained late 70's solo every time. Still... this was a pretty fun first-up effort from Ambush & if you live for early 80's Priest then you'll undoubtedly lap it up.

For fans of Judas Priest, Accept & Riot.

3.5/5

Ambush are not a band I have come across before and so I went in without too many expectations. It is true that the band do owe a massive debt to eighties' Judas Priest and while they do turn in a couple of decent Priest-ish tracks in opener Firestorm and Don't Shoot (Let 'em Burn) too many of the rest are quite ordinary and lack the hooks and memorable lines of classic Priest and even those two have horrible whoa-oh moments in them that were one of the worst things about 80's metal in my opinion. Then there's a track like Close My Eyes that sounds far too close to Don't Stop Believing or some such shit. Personally I enjoyed the soloing, but then again I like more restrained solos rather than extravagant and excessive shredding. I think it's fair to say that my favourite Guardians-related material resides quite far back in time and although this does hark back to the eighties even Judas Priest were left wanting in that decade (it was all downhill after Killing Machine) and this references The Scorpions as much as Priest. Overall, a couple of decent tracks and some unremarkable stuff that refers back to an era I was never that enamoured with in the first place. Sorry, but this is not really for me.

2.5/5