Upon seeing the heavily tattooed figure on the back cover of this album for a minute I was afraid this was going to be another one of those stoopid metalcore thingees, but luckily that's not the case. The figure in question is Jacob Bredahl, who also sings in thrash band HATESPHERE and plays guitar in BARCODE. Drummer Stefano Longhi is label manager of Scarlet Records. According to an interview I read with these guys this record is their attempt at playing stonerrock. They even cite KYUSS as an influence.

Whether they succeed depends on your definition of "stonerrock". Of course I've already heard the album twice before reading said interview and now that they've mentioned it I can hear some KYUSS-influence in the riffs. Don't expect anything like mellow desert rock grooves though. The old hard rock influences are certainly there, but overall the sound on this CD is more ENTOMBED than KYUSS. If brutally played hard rock riffs combined with screaming vocals sounds like your thing this could be the right album for you. Songwise it's no great shakes, it's too blunt and thrashy to be stoner yet not brutal and fast enough to appeal to the average purist metalhead. So while it's certainly not bad personally I also think it's not entirely successful, since it tries to be a little bit of both but doesn't succeed at either. What we've got here is a collection of fair-to-decent hardrock'n'roll songs. Nothing great or mind-boggling but played quite well and most importantly, played and produced really loud.

Oh, and lest I forget; the lyrics are all based on Derek Raymond's serial killer novel "Dead Man Upright".

- Van Hoften

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