Morpheus Kitami's Reviews

Following up the first of many Scottish albums, Knights of the Cross is about the Crusades. Kind of, because Grave Digger manages to sneak in a reference to Scotland again. It's not the most accurate portrayal of the conflicts, but that's not surprising. It's rather heavy towards the post-war inquisition stuff which suggests to me they originally thought they would make something about that.
Knights is a broadly typical Grave Digger album. Aggressive power metal. Definitely not like your Sonata Arcticas and Rhapsodys, but still distinctly within the realm of power metal. On the whole not quite typical. There are riffs under the vocal lines and sometimes you can hear the bassist! While there are your typical power metal material lying around, Grave Digger primarily does either very heavy stuff or very moody, not really ballad type of stuff.
Chris Boltendahl has a very distinct, hard to get used to vocal style. At first you have a very gruff, 10 pack a day vocal style, which aren't really growls, and sort of defy comparisons. On the other, you have a very clean, very melodic style which one would be surprised came from the same person. Boltendahl doesn't really do much of the latter here, at best doing a quiet version of his usual shtick. Choruses are often done in a very thrashy shout style.
The problem with how Knights of the Cross does this is that it kind of flows awkwardly. Grave Digger has this really unfortunate habit of having two songs on an album that sound very samey, here, Monks of War is that to the title track, and they're the first two tracks. Followed by Heroes of this Time, which isn't a great song to begin with, it has a very awkward transition between the verses and the chorus, but worst of all, Monks of War uses "Heroes of this Time" as one of it's lyrics. Could we not have had, instead, say, a song about some minor Muslim commander whom even the Christians respected instead of one of these two? After all he was one of the few people everyone respected at the time. While Fanatic Assassins is a fantastic song, it does feel somewhat strange as the only Arab-centered song.
Like all Grave Digger albums, it takes a while to get used to, and despite the awkward flow, has more than enough good material on the album to make up for it.

I've never really gotten Annihilator. They're not a bad band, they're not a Meliah Rage tier band, where where they're just sort of there. It's just in the years since I first listened to their albums I rarely ever get the urge to revisit them. I remember that the only consistent member of the band is guitarist and occasional singer Jeff Waters, and this is generally the most liked album they released.
For a technical thrash band, they sure don't sound like it. I mean, it's bassy, quite a few riffs on some songs, but for the most part it just sounds like a mundane thrash album. Jeff Waters seems like he's trying to have a more jazzy kind of solo style than you typically get at times with thrash. I think, anyway, it doesn't really sound like anything I've heard from a jazz album but that could just be because the albums I listen to don't mesh with what Waters heard.
The album flows weirdly. The intro track is a non-metal instrumental, followed by a song with an intro that isn't terribly metal either. This is something of a theme, the technical and even thrash aspects of the album feel like something of an informed genre, as often the way the songs go off has more in line with prog. One thing is for certain, with this track order the band wanted to get across that this isn't your typical thrash album. Which does work...until the album becomes something of a typical thrash album.
The vocals are similarly hard to pin down. On a basic level, he's a refugee from a USPM band, maybe a bit more on the thrashy side. Apparently he did more with punk bands than with metal ones. He can do a few interesting tricks, but mostly seems to stick to a not really USPM kind of vocal style, which isn't necessarily bad, but contributes to how this album feels out of whack. Not helping are somewhat limp lyrics concerning abuse and a ill-chosen Poe tale.
That's all not to say that this is a bad album, merely that Alice in Hell doesn't really know what it wants to do. It feels too ingrained in normal thrash to make much use of Waters's abilities, but too out of normal thrash to be a straight thrasher. The music is all good, just with an awkward track listing.

Darkmoon Blade is a band trying to really imitate that first wave of black metal spirit, with mixed success. There's all the stuff you'd expect from that description, crappy production, not really growling but not clean vocals. This influence includes Mercyful Fate, a band with which doesn't quite fit in with those other first wave BM bands. Indeed, at moments they try to channel that Mercyful Fate spirit, it doesn't work, which unfortunately culminates in a Fate-eqsue romantic ballad.
I'm not really sure the band captures the right production for what they're going for. There's less an outright raw production in the black metal sense and more a raw production in a modern demo kind of sense. There are parts where I expected a song to build up more than it did, or vocal lines not quite meshing with the rest of the music. Something that you would expect to be fixed on a commercial album as opposed to a demo, yet aren't.
Which isn't to say it's a bad album. When the album works, it really works. The guitarist, when he isn't being lazy, has a really nice style. It's got the obvious black metal trappings, but it feels all over the place in terms of influences. In short, succeeding at their intentions, but with a more wistful, mysterious style characteristic of later bands. This is no clearer than in the solos, not some technical masterwork, but feels beautiful and melodic within the confines of the band's style.
I have mixed feelings on the vocals, he's trying to go somewhere between a not quite growling vocalist and a Warrior-style, but doesn't quite commit to either. It never really felt like he was all that special, but I didn't dislike it. His attempts at clean vocals badly imitate King Diamond, in that ballad I immensely dislike. It just reminds me how King Diamond gets away with all the shit he does because he just has that good a range, and this guy just doesn't.
I look forward to seeing what these guys do in the future. Whenever they aren't just rerecording the same album again. As I wrote this they released a new version of this album. They're new versions of these songs, they sound different, but I'm not really sure I'd say they sound worse or better.

One of the reasons why I don't care for Accept despite them basically writing half the material of 90% of power metal bands is the legendary Udo. He has a certain voice that I enjoy about as much as I enjoy hearing gunshots in the middle of the night. Blood of the Nations doesn't have Udo, as he has a successful enough solo career and apparently enough animosity with Wolf Hoffmann to not wish to appear for their big reunion album. So, now they got the much less annoying and much less German Mark Tornillo, out of TT Quick. Which is something I didn't really know ever. He's not some younger fellow that the old man bosses around, though considering who he is I don't doubt Tornillo didn't want to rock the boat now that he was in his dream role.
Unfortunately, I don't really care for this anymore than I do their classic period. I have a lot of minor issues but nothing really major. Andy Sneap did the production, but it's not one of his more annoying works. Doesn't fall into most modern metal production pitfalls. It's good, but nothing really feels like it excels. Nothing I would necessarily object to if forced to listen to, but I would hardly listen to it randomly myself.
Hoffmann is good at writing riffs, but he was never the best soloist. In fact, now, he's downright boring. At least I assume it's Hoffmann. I feel like I sort of gave up on the quality of these when I recognized a solo from not only an earlier album, but the same solo repeated twice, practically note for note. Also not helping, the bizarre insistence on writing long songs, very few of the tracks last as long as they should, some going on for a tedious 7 minutes. Brevity is the soul of wit as far as the kind of music Accept is going for, and this is so not brevity.
Ultimately, I don't think the positive work out too well for the album. It feels somewhat like a focus tested version of what a metal album should be like.