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{mosimage}Leverage introduce us their second studio album: Blind Fire, turning to be one of the most interesting Finnish melodic metal bands nowadays.

After the success of their debut album Tides in 2006, it was about time for Leverage to come back thinking big with another studio album, released by not others than Frontiers Records, one of the most important metal record companies in the world. Pekka Heino, Marko Niskala and the rest of the band offer excellent lyrics and melodic songs, without an excessive orchestration, just simple good metal, but very catchy.

The opening track Shadow in the Rain or King of the Night sounds classy, reminding the good metal melodies of the 80s. Heino has really great vocal skills and the keyboard does not overwhelm the rest of the instruments, with some good and hooky guitar solos here and there like in Stormchild or Heart of Darkness, and just creates the perfect atmosphere to enjoy Pekka’s exquisite voice.When having an excellent first album, it is difficult task for many bands to continue with the same high level of creation.

But Leverage has been able to make the transition to a mainstream company and release just less than 2 years later a very recommendable follow-up. Do not expect great surprises, but just enjoy some good melodic heavy metal.

Rating 4/5

{mosimage}The Wombats do not come from Australia but from Liverpool and are ready to make you move your body in the dance floor.

The Wombats were born in 2003 in Liverpool, being the band composed by “Murph” Murphy (vocals, guitar, keyboard), Dan Haggis (drums, vocals) and Norwegian Tord Overland Knudsen (bass, vocals). They introduce us their debut album: A Guide to Love, Loss and Desperation, that surely will not make you feel indifferent.

A lot of humour starting from the songs titles, in tracks like Kill the Director or in the off-kilter waltz Party in The Forest (Where is Laura?), but also with a certain touch of sadness and not taking themselves too seriously, like the singer Murph himself recognises: “It is fun, but with dark undertones thrown in there. There’s a fair bit of self-deprecation going on”. And certainly there must be a mix of both for mixing successfully concepts like dancing in a discotheque and the melancholy of Joy Division in a song like Let’s dance to Joy Division.

No band had had the balls to join such concepts before!  In a way, it is the same old story written with a softer and not so serious touch, the life of some young guys full of lost love, parties and some small mischief. Nothing better to resume the philosophy of the band that the first track’s title: Tales of Girls, Boys & Marsupials. At some point their rhythms can remind you of the Swedes The Hives, adding the perfect doses of nostalgia to be very well received by the Finnish audience. Definitely one of the best and freshest debut albums of the last months.

Rating 4/5

{mosimage}Third Avantasia album by Tobias Sammet, the leader of the German metal band Edguy. Once more, with an amazing list of collaborators to create another great metal opera.

The fans had to wait a lot to see a new Avantasia album on the stores, since 2002, when the second album of Avantasia, The Metal Opera Part II, was released, so no wonder that The Scarecrow has become one of the most commented releases of the recent times in the metal industry. After the success of the previous two parts, but also after the efforts of congregating the right musicians, Tobias Sammet took a long break before planning everything carefully and come back stronger than ever with the third Avantasia's album.

It was worthy to wait, and impressive to take a look at the list of collaborators: Alice Cooper, Eric Singer, Kai Hansen, Amanda Somerville, Bob Catley or “le enfant terrible” and metal renegade Michael Kiske are some of the names that have helped Sammet to create this new metal odyssey. The album is a bit more eclectic and softer than previous ones, with Sammet flirting with a wide range of metal styles: from the classic songs that will be more than welcome by the old-school fans Shelter From The Rain or Another Angel Down to the catchy ballads of Carry Me Over, What Kind of Love or Cry Just a Little or extravaganzas like The Toy Master (vocals courtesy of the always dangerous and exciting Alice Cooper) and also space for a more commercial sound in Lost in Space.

All in all, The Scarecrow is a great album, well produced and orchestrated, that will satisfy to all the open-minded metal fans. Just the chance to listen to Kiske singing heavy metal songs once more deserves to get it!

Rating: 4/5

{mosimage}The veteran thrashers from San Francisco Bay are back. Brutal sound for blowing your brains!

Formed in 1982 (Being Metallica´s Kirk Hammet one of its founders), Exodus has been able to remain for more than two decades and a half on top of the metal scene. The Atrocity Exhibition (Exhibit A) has been recorded in Oakland with famous producer Andy Sneap, who has collaborated with some others well known bands like Megadeth or Machine Head. And what you can find here is huge doses of straight trash/speed metal with not much farther space for ornaments or experiments. Rod Dukes works pretty decently in the vocals, from the old trash metal school, sounding like he has to sound: raw and angry; a good substitute for the former singer Paul Baloff, who died in 2002.

But the best part comes from the tight riffs spread all over the tracks, courtesy of Gary Holt and Lee Altus. Just pay attention to the solos in Funeral Hymn or in Children of a Worthless World, suiting perfectly with the drums of Tom Hunting. 

Definitely delivers a  product with balls that you cannot miss if you want to be tuned with the American trash scene nowadays. Probably the album will have soon a continuation with an "Exhibit B" part, as Holt, the guitar player, recently commented. Reminding for some moments the best and younger Metallica, Exodus has been able to make a great come back.

Rating 4/5

{mosimage}British legendary metal band Saxon features a double DVD with a lot of extra features that surely will leave the fans more than satisfied.

Saxon release a double DVD called To Hell and Back Again with a lot of material. The first disc includes an interesting documentary about the process of creation and touring of their album Lionheart, but in my opinion it turns to be too long, one hour and a half where images and sometimes stupid footage is mixed with some other interesting opinions. Everything could have been looked better and more compact in just half of that time, with a better edition.

There is also a live part with different songs during the tour, but one does not know in what place they are playing every one of them, so it is a bit misleading. The second disc is much better, with all the recent video clips and a very cool tribute to Judas Priest: Doro sits in with the band on the classic song You Got Another Thing Coming, and also 2 excellent clips of their appearance in Rock for Asia 2005.

To all this you add a complete live show in Rocksound festival in Switzerland during 2006 with a good audio and a great feeling with the audience (with some glorious moments like when singer Biff Byford explains to the audience that he is not wearing his shorts, but some others he had to borrow since his pairs are still left in Finland). All in all, not a bad release at all,  with good and bad moments, but with a very big amount of curious and unreleased material if you want to know more about one of the fiercest metal band of the history.

{mosimage}I am very glad that there is still the thing called genuine punk rock, although I don’t necessarily spend a lot of time listening to it. Jumalan Ruoska, a Finnish punk rock band, remind me of that once again.

Jumalan Ruoska’s brand of punk rock is somewhat different from all these “too serious to be taken seriously” bands – they have a sense of humour and are not afraid to show it. This sense of humour and playfulness is evident from both the music and lyrics. There are moments of social commentary, like the song Eihän tässä nyt näin pitänyt käydä (which is about global warming), but overall they seem to be focusing on having fun.   

Sixteen songs, total length barely over thirty minutes, so Jumalan Ruoska don’t really like to spend too much time on one single track. Although the music couldn’t exactly be called challenging to play, at least they sound tight and not the least bit sloppy. They also offer some variety: amongst the straight-ahead blasting there are a couple of acoustic numbers, and even the most blatant hardcore numbers don’t sound boring.   

Since the release of this album, Jumalan Ruoska has split up, but all the members of the band continue making music. The spirit of punk rock lives on, and I feel happy about that.

Rating 4/5 

{mosimage}Widescreen Mode has become one of the newest and hottest hard rock bands in Finland, with the release of their debut album: Until the End.

The debut album of the Finnish metal band Widescreen Mode, Until the End, has raised like a rocket into the Finnish music charts, directly to the peak, and this is greatly due to the good promotion campaign in Internet, MySpace and Itunes with their first single Everlasting Bomb (lyrics inspired by the film The Planet of the Apes), a success that has been followed and even increased with the second single of the album: Dead Inside, an excellent choice since it is undoubtedly one of the best tunes of the whole record.

The band from Riihimaki is composed by Samu Brusila on the vocals, Janne Lahtinen as guitarist, Janne Stenroos on the bass and Janne Aaltonen on the drums (it could have perfectly been renamed as "the Jannes").

Widescreen Mode makes a perfect example on how the promotion in alternative channels like Internet can bring excellent results. They were finalist in the MTV’s unsigned competition and have gathered more than 65.000 fans in MySpace. But when I listen to them, I cannot see the special magic needed to push the songs to the number 1 of the charts. The melodies are correct and technically, they sound compact; the vocals skills of Samu work fine, the CD visual design is cool, but the sound, that explores more the softer than the rougher side of the metal, although the brutal beginning of the album in Without Me could mislead you, is typical and unsurprising; nothing that you could not hear from dozens of other Finnish bands trying to make their way in the difficult world of music business. In any case, for being a debut album, it gives a very praising result, and hopefully with more maturity and new works Widescreen Mode could reach the status of new Finnish super metal band. But there is still a long way to go…

Rating 3/5