2 posts tagged “slave”

Seeing as I've been sent a lot of modern deathcore and whatnot the last few weeks, it was refreshing to pop Caroline Blue's debut EP 'Slave to the Hourglass' into my cd player and have my ears greeted with some excellent hard rockin' 80s heavy metal.

And the great thing about Caroline Blue is how aware of themselves they are. There is no pretensiousness or silly gimmicks here, nor is this a Darkness/Wig Wam attempt at resurrecting as many silly cliches from the 80s and 70s as possible (even though I do like both of those bands). These guys just take a simple structure, some good catchy rocking riffs and good but not pretensious vocals to belt out some cool, powerful classic metal songs. On top of that they have some excellent solos, nothing ridiculously technical, just enough to give the songs a bit more juice.

Structurely this is about as typical as traditional metal can be, but that's partly what's so good about it. A composition-style that I'm familiar with and enjoy a lot, used to create some excellently catchy and addictive rock/metal songs. My choice cuts would be the slightly epic opening title track, 'Hard Life' (which funnily enough, slightly reminds me of 'A Hard Day's Night' in the chorus) and 'The Queen of Pleasure'.

Oh yeah, and there are some bonus tracks. The first is a pretty nice guitar instrumental, I could live without it but it's still a pretty decent addition, and then next is a recorded message from what sounds like a landlord informing the band that the neighbours have been complaining about late-night loud drums and one of the band members humping a stuffed animal in the window. My kind of band!

-Let us know what you think!