Clean Hands Go Foul-Khanate, Hydra Head, 2009

10/10

How long has it been now since Things Viral landed on my desk and spun my fookin’ world totally around? Don’t recall now but I have to say that 15 listens into Clean Hands Go Foul I’ve got that heavy metal honeymoon feeling again. There’s a fine line between tooling around the mazes of your mind with Khanate and unraveling a dark night of the soul with some highfalutin book and some sort of spiritual guidebook. No matter which side of the cross you’re on and no matter which side of start or finish you land the whole thing winds up in catharsis. Clean Hands Go Foul has taken this listener on a different quest, a different journey, a different tour of the psyche and soul with each listen and it seems unlikely that any of that will change in the future. What does this have to do with you, dear reader? If you are wise you will come to treasure this and the entire Khanate catalogue as you might your vital organs. Indispensable. For this scribe, Khanate is a recent friend and, potentially, a lifelong companion.Jedd Beaudoin

He Who Shall Not Bleed-Dimension Zero, Candlelight, 2009

7/10

Guess what? This sounds like At The Gates with maybe a dash of Arch Enemy. While that’s a welcome relief for those of us who know that the likelihood of a new At The Gates record is about as likely at this point as a Cliff Burton solo project, it’s hard to make the case that this is particularly inspired or original. While it is thoroughly br––al and thoroughly aggr––ve, and the band does hail from Sw–––n, recommending this for anything more than a stroll down Slaughter of the Soul lane is hard. Certainly everything’s a little derivative but there are signs here that Sw––ish d––h m––l is going the way of Hollywood––recycling old ideas with slightly more palatability and far less of the ingenuity involved in the original. Boo hoo? Maybe. Exciting? Definitely not. A phenomenon that scribes like us can stop with a bad review? Not.––––––––––––––––––––––Jedd Beaudoin

Crash and Burn-Sinner, Candlelight, 2009

8/10

Throaty vocals, muscular, fast-paced riffing and a sequence that more bands could take notes from, this is indeed a throwback to a bygone era––think classic Saxon, Accept and about 150 anonymous bands from the 1980s that recorded albums then gained immortality to clammy-handed headbangers who collected Iron Maiden picture discs and worshipped Armored Saint as the next great hope. Littered with as many clichés as a library full of 12 Step literature, the lyrics still empower the listener with a sense of normalcy and a larger than normal manliness. While this won’t launch a thousand new bands it may send a few kids to the woodshed to hone their grasp of real metal guitar solos. (For once it sounds like somebody remembers what it was like to hunker down with some Ace Frehley solos and a bottle of cold gin.) Delightful if not thoroughly original.––––––––––––––––––––––Jedd Beaudoin

New Metal Leader-Ross The Boss, Candlelight, 2009

8/10

Is this powerful? Well, I shuffled a handful of these tunes together, played ‘em for my septuagenarian neighbor and cured him of his five-year dependency on Viagra. His twentysomething girlfriend thanked me profusely. (No need to say how profusely.)

Not since Into Glory Ride has the fur on my neck stood up for anything remotely related to Manowar as it did during the opening moments of this little sucker. By the time the guardians of real metal rolled out “Blow Your Speakers” in 1987 on Fighting the World the true Manowar, like the true Raven, was as much a remnant of the imagination as that soup you wolfed down at Granny’s house when you were six or seven. But here, it’s like 1982 all over again with the ultra manly “Blood of Knives,” “Death and Glory,” “Matador” and “Plague of Lies” (reminds me of the time I first heard Armored Saint’s “Can U Deliver”), ‘cept the production is much, much better and I’m not stuck in the attic bedroom freezing my ass of while flexing my prepubescent muscles and pretending that one day I, too, may don a furry loincloth and get approximately zero chicks.

True, some of the material here hits a little too close to the contemporary––“Constantine’s Sword” is a stab at Marilyn Manson that’s only saved by a nod or two to the mighty Manilla Road and “We Will Kill” calls to mind King Diamond at a Harley rally. (Not a good thing, with all due respect to NASCAR enthusiast King.) And, finally, the album might be slightly more solid without the closing “Immortal Son.” But, damn, it’s good to have Ross The Boss still making records.

Death to false metal indeed.––––––––––––––––––––––Jedd Beaudoin

Polaris-Stratovarius, Armoury, 2009

6/10

A welcome stab at the power metal crown from Stratovarius, a band that’s had its share of bad times for much of the last decade, whether the bloated Infinite (2000), the expansive (and bloated) Elements (2003), a two-album release that had enough killer material to fill a fairly short EP, and the almost unmentionable 2005 self-titled outing that seemingly all members of the band have abandoned like rats abandon a sinking ship. Polaris rights some past wrongs––namely keyboardist Jens Johansson’s role in this band finally makes sense; he seems to have found one of those rare albums that’s equal to his formidable talents; vocalist Timo Kotipelto is in fine form and new guitarist Matias Kupiainen adds cocksure riffs and solos in exactly the right spots.

Problem is, the energy heard in “Deep Unknown” and “Falling Star” fades by the third track, the moody “King of Nothing.” The individual performances don’t suffer from that point forward but the album’s pacing and its promise do. By “Winter Skies,” the fifth track, one begins to wonder if you can call anything that displays such a lack of intestinal fortitude “power” metal. It’s not a total wimp out but it sure inspires somnolence more than heavy metal solidarity. Luckily “Forever Is Today” steps in to save everything––albeit momentarily as we go back to sleep just a few tracks later with the daftly titled “Somehow Precious” (appropriate for a song about your grandmother’s poodle but not manly enough for metal).

The more rockin’ “Emancipation Suite” could have been cut in half and the closer “When Mountains Fall” is almost unnecessary. By the halfway mark one begins to wonder if the boys could have cut the sobbing tunes in favor of some comically fast-paced rockers that would further cement Stratovarius’ comeback rather than compromising it. There’s still fight in this band but you can’t help but wonder how much.––––––––––––––––––––––Jedd Beaudoin

Blood-OSI, Inside Out, 2009

8/10

Kevin Moore and Jim Matheos have finally recorded an album that lives up to the paper promises of this project. While the group’s 2003 debut with Mike Portnoy on drums did little to titillate the imagination and 2006’s Free proved equally predictable, Blood feels like a genuine surprise, the kind of record that Porcupine Tree should be making if only Steve Wilson and Co. could get over the idea of swimming into the mainstream and if ol’ Steve were a little less obsessed with glistening production

The album opens with “The Escape Artist,” a heavy mother that doesn’t relent for the entirety of its nearly six minutes; that’s followed by the eerie, “No Quarter”-esque “Terminal” (that is, of course, if “No Quarter” had appeared on Pretty Hate Machine), the truly atmospheric “We Come Undone” (the kind of thing that will excite fans of Ulver, David Torn and the moodiest of film soundtracks) and the titular track, which features Opeth belter Mikael Akerfeldt.

The album has two moments that prove disappointing––oddly enough, they’re the shortest tracks––the meandering sound collage that is “Microburst Alert” and what might be an attempt at a track made for radio play, the mildly derivative “False Start.” (the track sounds like the Dandy Warhols’ “Bohemian Like You” in a knife fight with the Mars Volta.) Elsewhere, Matheos and Moore (who are joined by drummer Gavin Harrison of the aforementioned Porcupine Tree) prove themselves more than worthy of the hero worship they’ve amassed over the decades and which will no doubt grow once the public dips its ears in Blood.––––––––––––––––––––––Jedd Beaudoin

Frequency-IQ, Inside Out, 2009

8/10

IQ has been kicking it for nigh on three decades now, releasing records about as frequently as Thomas Pynchon offers forth a new tome. (Actually, maybe with slightly more regularity––but barely). Anyway, the five year wait since Dark Matter has been worth it, at least for IQ fans. The real gift of this record is that each instrument is allowed breathing room––John Jowitt’s bass splurts and splatters and generally sounds supreme whilst Michael Holmes offers up some of the best six-string licks you’re likely to hear in the prog realm this year. And if you don’t care much for Mark Westworth’s Dr.Who ivory tinklings or Peter Nicholls’ relatively indistinct voice (somewhere between Jon Anderson and James LaBrie but with a purity that ultimately robs it of character), it’s OK. They grow on you to the point that imagining any other voice or any other twittering on tracks such as “Life Support,” “Stronger than Friction” and even “Ryker Skies” and the obligatory––and pretentiously titled––epic “The Province of the King” is simply impossible. If you’re a longstanding IQ fan (and they are many) Frequency won’t disappoint; if you’re a prog stalwart who wants to hear everything under the sun released in the genre this year, Frequency is also for you. Not an instant classic but a pretty damn good stab at it. In the end, it’s an undeniably charming record from a band that doesn’t recognize its limitations or give a damn about them.––––––––––––––––––––––Jedd Beaudoin

The Visitor-UFO, SPV, 2009

8/10

One of the longest running middling bands, UFO has nothing left to prove. There are no radio hits to be had, no stadium tours to strive for and, despite the intentions of certain Metallica members, probably no Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremonies to attend. Like the plumber who will probably never gain scores of new clients, like the car salesman who will get a knock off gold watch as a retirement gift, like the high school literature teacher who teaches the classics each semester with an eye on that golden summer in the ever-distant future when he might get a shot at writing his own masterpiece, UFO has a job to do. And the elder statesmen of ass-shakin’ rock do it just as well as always on The Visitor.

Stalwart bassist Pete Way is not along for the ride, suffering as he is from a liver ailment, but flash guitarist Vinnie Moore, in tandem with fellow axe grinder Paul Raymond, offers up some of the tastiest old school denim rock riffing this aging critic has heard since the first four ‘Umble Pie records. “Saving Me,” “Stop Breaking Down” and “Living Proof” aren’t new classics for this millennium but neither are they hollow workaday rockers. There’s an unmistakable vibrancy in the music and a hunger for something––acknowledgment, or just simply getting it right they way that all artists strive to get it right––that imbues each of the 10 tracks found here.

Even later tracks such as “Forsaken,” “Stranger in Town” and “Can’t Buy a Thrill” buoy this affair along with a resilience that suggests that UFO may be one of those bands that actually has to be carried off the stage at some point in the future. This is easily the best album of its kind in recent years and certainly light years ahead of anything the Rolling Stones have released since Some Girls. Three cheers for UFO, longer still may you run.––––––––––––––––––––––Jedd Beaudoin

Mission Control

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