Review by Sonny for Satan (GBR) - Court in the Act (1983)

The NWOBHM was a great time to be a heavy metal fan here in England but, in truth, many of the young bands doing the rounds had trouble translating their energetic live performances into recorded format. This meant that, outside of the obvious candidates like Iron Maiden, Saxon and a handful of others, there were very few really dynamic albums released in those years. This is not true of Satan however. Their 1983 debut had a heady velocity to it and their version of heavy metal, whether by accident or design I cannot say, leaned a lot more towards speed metal, occasionally even sounding a bit thrashy.

The production isn't exactly stellar, a trait that also hampered a lot of the NWOBHM, and the guitars for certain could have done with a bit more oomph and depth, sounding a little bit thin. This is a great shame because these riffs are actually pretty great, but even they are cast into the shade by the two gutarists' incendiary soloing. The vocals also suffer from production weakness and have something of a distant reverb-y tone. Top and bottom of it is that Court in the Act is an album of energetic and generally high tempo tracks with awesome guitar work and with a much better production job it would rightly be considered a NWOBHM classic alongside Lightning to the Nations, Wheels of Steel and Number of the Beast. Still, despite these issues it is still fairly obvious that this is an exciting and vibrant act going about their business of slaying audiences and listeners with their salvos of infectious, hi-octane heavy metal.