Surprisingly, this year I did not listen to much by way of really new heavy metal – nor did I listen to all that many metal albums. But the ones I DID listen to, were in many cases really damn good. Here are the top albums I heard in 2023.
1. VISION DENIED – Age of the Machine
This is one that I came across on TEH YOOTOBZ, which is an amazing source of full-length heavy metal albums from across a very wide range of genres. The album is, as far as I can figure it, a concept about a galactic conflict involving various outlaws. I cannot say much more about it than that, other than it really rocks. It was my favourite album for the year, I found it almost endlessly replayable. It combines the speed and soaring vocals of a great power metal band, with the epic concepts and thinking-man’s metal of something like HELLOWEEN, from back around the Time of the Oath era. This is an exceptionally good album, and I highly recommend it to anyone interested in really great operatic power metal.
Didact’s Verdict: 4.5/5, seriously good entertainment, worth getting as an MP3 download if you can find it.
KILLER KUTS: pretty much the whole thing, but my favourites were probably “Two Worlds Collide”, “Beyond the Mirror”, and “Unchain the Light”.
2. GALDERIA – Return of the Cosmic Men
This is not by any means a new album. It dates back to, I think, 2016. GALDERIA is one of those bands that shone brightly for a while, then sort of disappeared for a long while, and I honestly have no idea what they are up to right now. But this album is just good, clean, simple, unpretentious, riotously good power metal at its most honest and upbeat. This whole album will just make you feel so damn HAPPY. It is a tremendous pick-me up, right from the very first chords of the first song, straight to the ending number. It really has everything, as long as you try not to think too hard about the lyrics, which honestly are just pure fluff. This is honest-to-God power metal the way it bloody well should be done.
Didact’s Verdict: 4.3/5, slightly cheesy and even a tad saccharine in places, but really enjoyable nonetheless.
KILLER KUTS: “Shining Unity”, “High Up in the Air”, “Wake Up the World 2.0” – the last one is so freakin’ catchy, it should be quarantined by the CDC.
3. BLACK & DAMNED – Servants of the Devil
Plenty of people will probably wonder what the hell a Christian like me is doing, pitching for a band that is so obviously into the darker side of things. All I can say is, this album explores very dark subject matter in a very, very heavy and catchy way, and it does not try to glorify evil – it presents the Devil as a very dangerous, very cruel master in all of the songs and material, as is right and proper. The band does so while also being incredibly heavy, with an extremely powerful and crushing groove behind the tracks. Despite the subject matter, I genuinely like this album – it is for those times when you feel really angry and aggressive, and just want to break something.
Didact’s Verdict: 4.0/5, really solid grooves and chunky riffs topped with heavy lyrics and a powerful delivery.
KILLER KUTS: “Black and Damned”, “Servants of the Devil”, “Golden Wings”
4. BLAZON STONE – Live “Raiders of Sandviken” 2022
Pirate metal gets a bit of a bad rap these days, thanks to the increasingly tiresome antics of bands like ALESTORM and YE BANISHED PRIVATEERS. The original RUNNING WILD shtick was great, but really RUNNING FREAKIN’ WILD could ever pull it off. Everyone else was really just pretending.
… that is, up until Cederick “Sed” Forsberg came along. This guy has more talent in his little toe than most musicians have in their entire body. The dude is a multinstrumentalist par excellence – he routinely plays ALL, and I mean ALL, of the instruments in the multiple bands (yes, really) of various genres that he masterminds. This cat writes, plays, records, masters, and produces everything.
That gives you some idea of just how crazy hard he works.
For one of his projects, the RUNNING WILD rip-off act called BLAZON STONE – literally named after one of the former’s most famous and best songs – the latest album, Damnation, was a major hit among afficionados of this sort of metal. So, naturally, they decided to take their pirate metal live.
And good thing they did too, because Sed gathered together a great bunch of supporting musicians, who proceeded to put on a solid live show.
This album goes through many of their best songs across their catalogue, and provides immense entertainment. The intimate club setting helps as well – BLAZON STONE is the kind of band that will probably never hit the big stages at festivals or arenas, but they sure put on a tremendous showing when they want to.
Didact’s Verdict: 4.0/5, silly to be sure, but great fun nonetheless, as pirate metal always is.
KILLER KUTS: “Hell on Earth”, “Stand Your Line”, “Wandering Souls”, “Highland Outlaw”
5. ANGUS MCSIX – Angus McSix and the Sword of Power
When Thomas Winkler found himself YEETED out of GLORYHAMMER, the hilariously cheesy and silly space-opera power metal band that is basically the side-project/full-time-band of ALESTORM madcap mastermind Christopher Bowes, he did not hang around feeling sorry for himself for very long. Instead, he went and founded his own awesomesauce band, complete with costumes.
The result is, we now effectively have TWO versions of GLORYHAMMER in existence, and the metal world is very much the better for it.
This album is a concept that basically amounts to something like He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, before Netherflix and Kevin Smith got their filthy paws all over it. The album’s songs are all “out of order” – you have to decrypt some sort of weird code at the end to figure out what the “lore order” of the music is. But, it is your basic “hero gets his ass whupped by a dark lord, goes in search of a mystical magical Macguffin thingamajig, finds it, meets a girl, snogs said girl, comes back and kicks dark lord’s sorry keester”.
The predictable storyline aside, the music is rollicking good fun, and the album is refreshingly silly and cheesy. It is precisely what you need when you just want to switch off your brain and enjoy some good clean fun.
Didact’s Verdict: 3.8/5, a little dull in places, but still really fun to listen to, largely due to the strength and force of Thomas’s performance.
KILLER KUTS: “Sixcalibur”, “Amazons of Caledonia”, “Starlord of the Sixtus Stellar System”
Blast from the Past
REBELLION – Sagas of Iceland: The History of the Vikings Volume I
REBELLION are a band almost nobody remembers. But, for a spell, between about 2005 and 2010, they were really big in my gym rotation, and still are to some extent. This is because of their Viking History trilogy, starting with this album. The band was full of minor German metal luminaries – Uwe Lulis and Tomi Gottlich, formerly of GRAVE DIGGER, Michael Seifert of BLACK DESTINY, Gerd Lucking of TANKARD and various other bands, etc.
These three albums are almost uniformly superb. Every single song is great, pretty much. The first album tells the story of the Viking lords of old – names out of history like Harald Hardraada, Erik the Red, Harald Hafager, the saga of Ragnar the Dragonslayer and his sons, King Canute, etc.
The follow-up album, Miklagaard, was the telling of the epic journey of Harald Hardraada to serve as a member of the Varangian Guard in the Byzantine Emperor’s court, while the third was the Viking story of creation and destruction of the entire Universe, from the yawning abyss of Ginungagap to the final death of Ragnarok.
These three albums are great to listen to, either when working, or when rocking out in the car, or at the gym. The musicianship is superb, the songwriting is extremely solid, and the lyrics are actually quite good, considering they were written by Germans in their second language. Seifert’s vocals might take some getting used to, but I personally quite like them. The only major letdown is the drumming, which is incredibly straight and unimaginative – one only has to listen to the straight boring rhythms and imagine what someone like Randy Black or Freidrik Anderssen (former AMON AMARTH drummer) might have done with them.
This is one of those albums, in a trilogy, that makes you sit up and think what might have been.
1 Comment
The cover art for Age of the Machine is incredible.