Many metalheads knows that thrash-metal was the biggest metal genre during the 80’s, thrash-metal had its biggest stronghold in America but the thrash were spreading around the world as well. Many bands came to birth but there were many thrash-metal bands who fell equally as fast as the raised, the market was flooded and few bands are still active to this day. But thrash-metal was not going to be one of the most popular genres in the future, the kids simply got tired of thrash-metal and wanted to play a more extreme stryle of metal. Death and Black-metal was getting more popular a lots of sub-genres started to emerge. Sweden has been very popular when it comes to death-metal, but Sweden also had some good-quality thrash-bands as well.
Hypnosia,
Witchery and
Carnal Forge among others were and still some of them are some of Sweden’s most proudest bands, but there is one more band that emerged to prove that they could thrash as equally as good the others. This band is called
Raise Hell, they came to life in 1995 and they play a mix between intensive, atmospheric black-metal and heavy prime thrash-metal. This band could be placed in the same league as
Hypnosia and early
Kreator, the thing is that this band shows no mercy for the listener.
The album you will be introduced to is called
Holy Target which is their first album out of four. You can clearly hear that this band blends black and thrash-metal is a perfect way, the overall sound is more than great, you can hear the instruments very good and the musicianship is top-notch. I find this album flawless, extremely healthy and energetic and addictively catchy. The vocals is very similar to
Mille Petrozza’s vocals, the vocals here are raspy, forceful and sharp but yet quite neutral, the album delivers non-stop black/thrash, enough to snap your neck because of all the headbanging you will be forced to do. This album was even recorded at
The Abyss studio which is owned by the metal god and master producer
Peter Tägtgren from
Hypocrisy.
Jimmy Fjallendahl – Vocalist of this band, he does a great job by delivering these agonized based vocals. These vocals suits perfect to the insanely fast music and it gives a very angry and don’t-mess-with-us feeling to the whole album. These vocals may still seem similar to other extreme metal bands but this is probably one of the most powerful singer I have heard yet. Okey, maybe not powerful but his vocals is very forceful, I don’t get tired of them.
Jimmy will be given a:
3.5/5 (great)
Torstein Wickberg – A former guitarist, he jump of after three albums but he had incredible guitar skills. The overall guitar sound in this album is very thick, catchy and very heavy. The rhythm sections are pure energy and the lead work is flawless, you have these haunting acoustics and monster shredding in songs like
The Red Ripper. Yes, there is basically devastating guitar work in every song, catchy and addictive riffs over and over again, awesome performance. This guy will be given a:
5/5 (classic, but I would say awesome!)
Niklas Sjöström – He is the bassist in this band, also a good musician but the sad thing is that you can’t hear his bass very good. The bass does though give the songs a thick and steady wall of sound, I can’t notice any standout performances. There are basically only rhythm performances, no solos or filler sections, but I think he still does a good job to keep up with the guitars. Not much from the bassist but I think he still deserves a:
4/5 (excellent)
Dennis Ekdahl – Drummer of this fine band, he has also a former drummer in a German power-metal band called
Mystic Prophecy. This is definitely the engine of this band, here you have tremendous double bass kicking, smashing and heavy beats and catchy patterns, all of them are molded superb along the shredding guitar. You also have typical black-metal drumming here, very intensive stuff but you will not get tired of this quick. I’m starting to like this kind of drumming so this drummer will be given a:
5/5 (awesome!)
Man I’m in ecstasy when I listen to this album, this is probably the best thing I have heard since
Hypnosia (when it comes to Swedish metal). This was definitely a real killer album and as I said before, you have a big risk to snap your neck if you headbang too much while listen to this. I must say that I enjoyed every single song! The band has made a perfect mix of extreme metal music, you have the evil and atmospheric black-metal molded with technical thrash-metal. Some of you might think that thrash is a lame genre but then you are wrong, listen to this and you will have other thoughts. I liked everything about this album, the metal elements was take turns if I say so, first you have a thrash-intro, then a black-metal chorus and then a molded verse. There was even some melodic elements here as well, calm melodic solos and riffing made this album even better,
Raise The Dead is one such song. If there is something I don’t like about this album it would be the intro track which is only a short instrumental solo song with sounds of war in the background.
There you have it, maybe not much but I can’t find anything bad about this album, the vocals were great, the guitar and drum work was awesome and the album cover was pretty darn cool. This was one of my random picks of metal, I scrolled through a site and saw this band, was a bit suspicous when I saw that the band had black-metal in their sound but when I got the album it really changed my mind. I really enjoyed writing this review and I hope this was a interesting peice of reading, comments are always welcome.
If you like black-metal you will love this, if you like thrash-metal you will love this. If you like metal at all you will love this, I was hooked by just listen to a random song and every song was equally as good and they didn’t felt similar to each other. My recommended songs would be
Mattered Out,
Raise The Dead,
The Red Ripper and
Black Visions. This album will almost be given a total score, there are not many albums that can hook me like this, so the score is:
4/5
This Message Edited On 09.12.06
