Five years have elapsed since the band’s previous acclaimed work which gave the band the opportunity to become more known around the world. Assuredly, as Empyrios is more of a music project and its members are part of other bands as well, that long hiatus between albums wasn’t unjustified… probably a tad too much though.
 

It had been a long time since I listened to a good punk rock album, and then I listened to “We Spread Diseases” by Vietcong Pornsürfers. The band consists of four Swedish guys that in their own words “started playing simply to make up for the lack of true cool rock bands, and too many old long gone past the best before date acts”. Their sound is closer to the fast rock‘n’roll that bands like Deadboys, Social Distortion, Iggy & The Stooges or even Motörhead used to play, rather than pure punk of the Sex Pistols or NOFX, Rancid and Penywise.
 

Pellek is a Norwegian vocalist who has been busy both as a solo artist with this “eponymous” band as well as a member of Damnation Angels.
 
While I am not going to challenge the fact that the guy has an amazing range, what seems to irk me a bit is his strong lingering and way he accents certain words, sometimes when he forms the sound and sometimes towards the end… If I was going to bring up as another example of a singer that does something similar that would be Timo Cotipelto, but it’s not going to be exactly the same thing, I’d be talking about.
 

Well, this month “Steel” has its honorable mention by the acts of this label so, as you can imagine, we are in Italy and Thunder Axe are filling our speakers with pure heavy metal music. Although the band took shape in 2000 under the name Fiaba & Friends, they soon – about a year later – changed it to Thunder Axe.
 

Ape Machine is a stoner/heavy rock band from Portland, Oregon that have just released their 3rd album entitled “Mangled by the Machine”. The band describes this album as “an angry conceptual piece of music that takes a cue from the masters of the 70s progressive masters, yet reflects the immediacy of the chaotic world all around us”. On the other hand, I would describe it as a kick-ass heavy album that you want to hear over and over again.
 

I remember happening upon this band during its early demo days when they used to be called Avalanche. Besides the gifted and beautiful Elize and the band’s mastermind Olof, I knew that this band generally had the talent and the will go big. I was impressed by their demo songs back in the day and I was waiting to see how they would evolve further.
 

Having taken their name from Death Angel’s debut “The Ultra-Violence, this newcomer band from Italy consists of young guys that worship the 80s thrash metal scene. At first, I thought that here we are with another band trying to “copy-paste” the 80s formula, as most bands of this new thrash metal movement of our time. After some careful listens I grasped that although these guys are on their early twenties, they have learned their lesson well and they are here to express themselves and present their own musical perspective.
 

Kingdom Come is a “sole case” since the day it was formed and a beloved band among the rock/metal fans. You see Lenny Wolf’s vocals have always given ‘em a specific texture and along with their catchy hooks they made Kingdom Come a very respectful part of the hard rock scene.
 

My personal journey for “new music territories” and new bands/artists is like an eternal journey… sometimes you get to meet new places and discover their appealing music sounds and others “some weird sounds” are coming to you out of nowhere. More or less that’s what happened with 1476… but what exactly is this band all about?
 

Sodom is, without any doubt, one of the top thrash metal bands of Europe. Along with Kreator, Destruction, Sabbat, Tankard and some others that I can’t remember now, they have delivered some truly great and influential albums to the thrash metal scene globally. Venom could easily have been in the category above but they also influenced black metal later and that’s a whole different story. Surely, their early “thrash metal” played a major role to the thrash metal movement as well.