Year Of The Dragon - Blunt Force Karma

Year Of The Dragon - Blunt Force Karma
2010, The International Brotherhood Of Consequential Truth

When Fishbone disintegrated after a quarter century, Dirty Walt Kibby and guitarist Tracy Singleton (Spacey T) went in a new direction together. Focusing on a heavy punk/metal sound, the band soon pulled in Roderick Palmer (Rodcore) as a vocalist and began trading under the name Year Of The Dragon. With regular gigs in L.A. and a well-received EP in A Time To Love Is A Time To Bleed, Year Of The Dragon drew on their core base of Fishbone fans while adding new fans drawn to the aura of the new band. Year Of The Dragon is back in 2010 with their first full-length album, Blunt Force Karma. It's a return to the concept albums of the 1970's and early 1980's, with a kitschy back story involving space aliens locking up all of the attractive women on earth. Year Of The Dragon leads the fight to restore the right in an album where the brute intensity of the band's sound sometimes struggles with the corny subtext that parallels that of Styx' Kilroy Was Here.

Year Of The Dragon starts strong with “Ispo Facto”. Big, impressive guitar work and a rap-style vocal line and a chorus about the downfall of freedom and end of the world make this a winner. Rodcore and Dirty Walt keep this song vital, appealing to the populace to educate themselves and stand up for their rights against a government that takes but does not give back. “Poppin’” goes to the other extreme, seeming to be more a song about shock value than thought. On “Destroy Your Fear”, Year Of The Dragon goes for a 1970’s metal sound ripe with minor chords and vocal triads. This is the band at their finest, creating songs that are progressive in construction and diabolical in tone. “Jailbreak” is the party song on the album, a fun rocker in the best early metal tradition.

Year Of The Dragon strips things down for “After The Dawn”, an interesting spoken word approach with a sung chorus built around a highly intriguing riff. The bare-bones presentation is a solid change of pace but dissolves back into the big guitar sound of the title track. “Blunt Force Karma” is a great tune with a message wrapped around an infectious funk rhythm. “Who Will Save You Now” is a driven rocker with philosophical learns that serves as an ample appetizer to the closing track, “Walking Tall”. “Walking Tall” features a crazy guitar riff you’ll have to hear to believe. Year Of The Dragon walks the line between Body Count and Black Flag with shades of Dio-era Sabbath on the most vibrant track on the album.

Year Of The Dragon hits a couple of small rough patches on Blunt Force Karma, but in general manages to match powerful messages with powerful sounds. Blunt Force Karma is one of the more convincing rock/rap hybrid albums of the new year thus far. Rodcore and Dirty Walt find a distinct brand of musical chemistry on Blunt Force Karma. It’s a chemistry that could be infectious, perhaps enough so to make a big splash in 2010.

Rating: 3.5 Stars (Out of 5)

Learn more about Year Of The Dragon at www.mysoace.com/yotd. Purchase Blunt Force Karma either on CD or digitally from Amazon.com. Digital copies are also availble from iTunes.

Review: Fozzy - Chasing The Grail

Fozzy - Chasing The Grail
2010, Riot! Entertainment

Fozzy has a long and inglorious history. Started as an Ozzy Osbourne cover band (Fozzy Osbourne) by members of Stuck Mojo, the band had a fateful meeting with WWE star Chris Jericho after a wrestling event in 1999. Jericho sat in with the band for a few shows but thought nothing serious of the collaboration. An ankle injury in 2000 that sidelined Jericho from wrestling brought him back to the band on a permanent basis. In the early days, Jericho performed as Mongoose McQueen, and Fozzy worked with a back story of having worked for twenty years in Japan under a music craft. Returning to the US, Fozzy found that a number of their songs had been "stolen" by major acts. Consequently, Fozzy's first two albums included covers of major rock and metal acts of songs supposedly written by Fozzy. In recent years Fozzy has moved to original material, gaining significant critical acclaim from the Rock media establishment that's lead to significant album sales and world tours. In January of 2010, Fozzy released their fifth album, Chasing The Grail. It's their best yet.

Fozzy opens with Under Blackened Skies, sounding like a cross between Metallica and Ozzy Osbourne. Under Blackened Skies is both tremendously aggressive and musical at the same time; high powered heavy metal with enough polish to reign on the Modern Rock charts as well. Martyr No More, chosen as a WWE theme for Wrestlemania, is built on a delicious riff. The song has great energy and a chorus that's pure, classic Rock N Roll. Grail features some delicious guitar work that can only be described as aggressively melodic. Grail is a powerful tune with something of a morality tale woven in.

Broken Soul is the sort of Pop-Inflected metal anthem that tops charts, launches sold-out tour and otherwise saturates airwaves until you can't even stand to hear the opening three notes of the song. Its tremendous songwriting with big harmonies a sing-along chorus; a certain Top-10 hit (at least). On Let The Madness Begin, Fozzy heads back to the abyss with a heavy melodic rocker loosely about temptation, spiritual warfare and giving in to our darker selves. The song is very catchy memorable and rocks like nobody's business. Pray For Blood is a big radio-oriented rocker that borders on mess but never really disintegrates. The song is strong from the perspective of sound and fury but lacks the cohesion that Fozzy displays on most of Chasing The Grail.

New Day's Dawn turns out to be a tough transition, with Jericho singing in a falsetto voice in an arrangement that's thoroughly out of character with the rest of the album. Rather than playing as a respite or illustrative diversion the song serves as a jarring slam on the breaks on a runaway train no one wants to stop. Fozzy gets a measured start forward with God Pounds His Nails, a powerful but trite song about the inevitability of life and consequence before sliding through the formulaic and bland Watch Me Shine.

Fozzy returns in full force on Paraskavedekatriaphobia (Friday The 13th), with flailing guitars, Metallica-style drum beats and a vocal line that explodes like a cannon-ball. Revival slows things down a tad for a heavy ballad that comes from the Ronnie James Dio/Sabbath school of Rock N Roll. Revival is full of hope; a jettisoning of the bad karma of Let The Madness Begin. Rich Ward's guitar work is creative and intricate, and the rhythm section of Frank Fontsere and Sean Delson fills the song with a driving menace. Fozzy closes in revelatory fashion with Wormwood, a nearly-fourteen minute mini-opera about the end of times written from the perspective of one who witnesses the spiritual wars accompanying the tribulation. The song is powerful and disturbing, transcending its genre to an uncomfortable art form. It's actually quite a wonderfully unsettling creation that adheres to the events detailed in the Book of Revelation and sets them against a dark and creative Progressive Metal arrangement.

It's often the projects that start out as an outlet that turn into something big. Fozzy started as a knock-off cover band for established musicians from Stuck Mojo; a play-thing to create a sense of musical balance that was fun and a step away from their day jobs. A decade later, you could argue that Fozzy is one of the more innovative (and commercially successful) metal bands stomping the floorboards of stages the world over. Chasing The Grail is the definitive work from a band whose arc is still rising. It's easy to imagine Fozzy one day taking their rightful places in Cleveland. The scary part is they just keep getting better.

Rating: 4 Stars (Out of 5)

You can learn more about Fozzy at http://www.fozzyrock.com/ or www.myspace.com/fozzytour. You can purchase Chasing The Grail as either a CD or Download from Amazon.com.

Review: Heaven And Hell - The Devil You Know

Heaven & Hell - The Devil You Know
2009, Rhino Records

Heaven & Hell just might be the ultimate 1970’s Metal supergroup. Lead vocalist Ronnie James Dio has a long and storied career starting out with Elf, then Rainbow, Black Sabbath and as a solo artist. Guitarist Tommy Iommi is the axe wizard behind Black Sabbath’s distinctive sound. Bassman Geezer Butler was also a part of the juggernaut that was/is Black Sabbath. Drummer Vinny Appice has played with Sabbath, Dio, WWIII, Rick Derringer and John Lennon, among others. Together they’ve found a mutual musical space that is familiar enough to fans of individual members while becoming something distinctive. Heaven & Hell’s latest CD, The Devil You Know, trods upon these almost familiar sands while finding something new in the sound.

The Devil You Know opens with Atom & Evil, a dark and heavily lumbering rocker. The song features some tremendous progressive guitar work and Dio hasn't lost a note. Bible Black is big guitar work at it's finest and even features a lyric prologue. This is Ronnie James Dio in his wheelhouse, pushing the sound he's been creating since the 1970's. Double The Pain is a surprisingly hooky bit of early prog-metal and sounds classic Sabbath at their most inspired. Dio and Iommi really rev it up on Eating The Cannibals with this highly melodic and driven prog-metal song. Both are at their best here. Follow The Tears is an interesting change of pace and sound: a martial horror movie in song. Angry, swelling guitars fold into ambient and ethereal synths, dark, minor keyes and Dio's iconoclastic voice for one of the most memorable hard rock songs of the year. Heaven & Hell kick the whole project up another notch with Neverwhere, a classic guitar rocker you won't soon forget. The album closes out with Breaking Into Heaven, a slow and plodding guitar metal song that hopefully finds more life live than it did here.

Heaven & Hell is a dream come true for some fans. Folks who have followed Dio or Black Sabbath will love The Devil You Know. If you're unfamiliar with the names and want to know how metal sounded back in the 1970's and early 80', then this disc is for you.

Rating: 3.5 Stars (Out of 5)

You can learn more about Heaven & Hell at http://www.heavenandhelllive.com/ or www.myspace.com/heavenandhelllive. You can pick up a copy of The Devil You Know at Amazon.com, or as a download through iTunes.

Review: Lisa Smith's Powerhaus - Maze Of Souls

Lisa Smith’s Powerhaus – Maze Of Souls
2008, Powerhaus

Lisa Smith is known to Canadian rock fans as Daneka, lead singer of goth rockers Exovedate. Chuck Page is known by guitar rock fans across Canada as one of the meanest axe players to strap on a six string. Put these two dynamic personalities together on stage and you have the type of pairing not seen since David Lee Roth and Eddie Van Halen decided they couldn’t share a sandbox. Smith’s powerful voice is capable of the vocal histrionics of Geoff Tate or Ronnie James Dio, the gruff extremity of Rob Halford, or the operatic metal of David Coverdale. Chuck Page is a blues/rock man, earning comparisons to Clapton, Jimmy Page and Jeff Beck. Put the two together and you have Lisa Smith’s Powerhaus, perhaps one of the best things to happen to the Toronto Rock N Roll scene in some time. Their debut album, Maze Of Souls, dropped in 2008 and is still making waves. Let’s check it out!

Maze Of Souls is a confounding album. Lisa Smith has an amazing rock voice; able to alter her sound to fit the song/style she’s singing within a limited breadth of styles. She’s somewhere between Lee Aaron and old school Pat Benetar stylistically. Her deep amber alto is lined with a bit of barbed wire when she wants it; there aren’t too many female rock vocalists like her nowadays. The band can rock when they’re up to it, and it seems like the potential is here for a an amazing ride on Maze Of Souls. What we find is a bit more typical of a 1980’s hair metal band, however. Maybe four songs of the eleven presented on Maze Of Souls truly inspire the listener, but there is a tendency toward blandness that belies the spark that the individual pieces can create. Maze Of Souls opens on The Verge, a straight forward classic hard rock tune. This is the listener’s introduction to Smith’s voice but is otherwise fairly typical of the genre. Red Door gets more into the hair metal sound, with Smith sounding a bit like Stephen Pearcy at times here. The Needle is the obligatory acoustic tune. This song gets stuck in a melodic and lyric rut pretty quickly, making up in repetition what it lacks in ideas.

Crazy For You turns things around in a big way. Huge hooks and a lively rock sound show off what the band is capable of, and Smith is right there driving the band along on what is by far the best song on the CD. Rat infuses a touch of blues into a straight up hard rock tune; the guitar work here is impressive and Smith’s vocal presence do a lot for an average song. Innocence Lost is perhaps the second best tune here, living on killer hooks and driving rock sound that will stick with you. The rest of the album is somewhat bland or even awkward (No More War) at times.

Lisa Smith has a voice that will knock you over the head and drag you back home. Within her range she’s a superstar, and Smith is smart enough to stay in her comfort zone on Maze Of Souls. The band is excellent, particularly guitarist Chuck Page, who has a bit of wizardry in his fingers. From the songwriting perspective Lisa Smith’s Powerhaus is generally pretty average or typical of their genre, although they do manage to find two or three breakout tunes here. A top notch producer could do big things with Lisa Smith’s Powerhaus; the potential is here.

Rating: 3 Stars (Out of 5)

You can learn more about Lisa Smith’s Powerhaus at www.myspace.com/lisasmithspowerhaus or http://www.chuckpagemusic.com/. You can purchase a copy of Maze Of Souls at www.cdbaby.com/cd/lspowerhaus, or you can download the album through iTunes.

Review: El Dorado - En Busca De Eldorado

Eldorado – En Busca De Eldorado

2008, Eldorado

Madrid has a secret, and it’s one that won’t keep. Madrid might just be home to the best new classic metal band around. Fans of Rainbow, Deep Purple and even Whitesnake will want to take note, Eldorado is the real deal. Combining a killer rhythm section with soaring guitar riffs, big choruses and a charismatic lead vocalist in Jesus Trujillo, Eldorado has found a winning Rock N Roll formula. Their debut album, En Busca De Eldorado, was produced by Richard Chycki whose worked with such august artists as Rush, Seal, Aerosmith, Sum 41, Kid Rock, Def Leppard, Pink and Dolores O’Riordan.

Eldorado mixes heavy blues, rock and classic 1970’s metal sounds into a musical patois that is both comfortably familiar and at the same time new and edgy. En Busca De Eldorado is eight tracks deep, with seven in Spanish and one in English. Even if you don’t speak Spanish, the musical language here is universal. En Busca De Eldorado opens with Abril, which has a real Def Leppard feel to the verse. Crushingly melodic guitars drive this song home while Trujillo goes soul-metal in a performance that is highly memorable. Guitarist Nano makes the point that he’s a force to be reckoned here with some incredibly hot soloing. Whereas Abril has a brooding core, El Final springs out of the gates with a lively beat and takes to the open road. Eldorado is a well-oiled machine here, rocking for all they’re worth. The harmonies on the chorus will hearken back to a time when most hard rock acts could really sing.

Un Mal Presentimiento sounds like something you might have seen on MTV in the hair band days of the mid-1980’s. Eldorado doesn’t skimp on the quality here, building a layered sound that is both melodic and edgy. Dejame Decirte sounds like a big rock ballad, fairly typical for the genre, but Trujillo’s vocals keep it more than interesting. En Busca De Eldorado goes for the big, soaring guitar sounds you might expect from Ronnie James Dio, although the song itself is a bit more polished and commercial than Dio might end up with. My favorite song here is El Jugador. Eldorado reaches down and grabs hold of an infectious blues core on El Jugador and refuses to let go. The result is a song that just won’t get out of your head. Mistreated is the only English Language song on the album, dealing even more keenly in a blues-heavy hard rock sound. You can tell the band is having fun on this one, waltzing into Prog territory with the song structure and even stepping on the toes of Led Zeppelin in a musical dance you won’t want to miss. The album closes with Identidad, the most ambitious rocker on the album; sure to be a concert favorite.

Eldorado is one of the most resilient and hardest rocking classic hard rock bands on the scene today. The fact that most audiences in the new world have never seen them aside, Eldorado is a band to watch. With a growing Latin American population and the addition of a few more English language songs, Eldorado may be on the precipice of jumping of the EU and taking over the rest of the Western Hemisphere. En Busca De Eldorado is amazing.

Rating: 4.5 Stars (Out of 5)

You can learn more about Eldorado at www.myspace.com/enbuscadeeldorado or http://www.enbuscadeeldorado.com/. You can purchase a copy of En Busca De Eldorado at www.cdbaby.com/cd/eldoradomusic.