HISTORY
Created in 1985 among other thrash giants as
Testament and
Exodus,
Forbidden came to the world. They released their debut album
''Forbidden Evil'' in 1988 but after that album the band started to go downhill, from being a technical thrash-metal band from the Bay-Area and later became almost the total opposite at the end. The bands career wasen't long lived, most because of economic problems, label issues and poorly promoted albums were some of the factors why
Forbidden disbanded.
ALBUM INFORMATION
If you have listen to their first album called
''Forbidden Evil'' you could easily imagine how this will sound like, for those who haven't heard about this album or band will be given a short description here. This album contains technical thrash-metal, there are many sorts of riffing and shredding in the songs. There are lots of guitar solos which are quite technical too, most of the times they are fast, somewhat complexive, not so catchy but they are pretty enjoyable. The drumming is basically the same for all thrash-metal bands, the patterns are very fast, also not so catchy but the drumming is performed with skills. The vocals are very good though, the vocals are skilled and would suit most people, if you like
Joey Belladonna from
Anthrax you might like this guy too.
THE BAND MEMBERS
The band members were five persons in this album and they were
Russ Anderson as vocalist,
Craig Locicero and
Glen Alvelais as the two guitarists, the bassist
Matt Camacho and drummer
Paul Bostaph. I would say that all of these guys did a pretty good work, the vocals had a good variety with both strong and some weak parts in some songs. The vocals had little bad a** attitude and it made the material a bit interesting to listen at. The guitars were good, the riffage had a good variety of technical and complexive riffs, the guitar solos were equally as good. There was nothing that seemed overdone or so, the solos were a bit melodic and well structured, fast, technical and some times catchy. The bass though was not so audible, it goes along with the rhythm guitars and helps to create a good rhythm section but there is no ''standouts'' from the bass. The drumming was very good, the patterns were classic for the genre and the variety was good. It was not the same similar patterns in every song and it made some songs more interesting than others.
MY POSITIVE THOUGHTS ABOUT THIS ALBUM
I liked their first album pretty much because of their technical abilities, there was some things here that grabbed my attention and we begin with the first thing. It was basically the technical riffage that hooked me a bit, the band were very good at deliver complexive guitar work. It maybe isen't so catchy all the times but it was quite enjoying time to time. The second thing I liked was the vocals,
Russ is or was a very good singer until their latest albums
''Distortion'' and
''Green''.
Russ delivered good shouts and aggressive vocal work, this was some reasons why this becamed my second half-favorite
Forbidden album.
MY NEGATIVE THOUGHTS ABOUT THIS ALBUM
I guess the negatives is more the the positive ones, I said before that I liked most of the musical parts but it was the songs that were the major problems. Many of the songs failed to grab my attention and thats because of the structures, the songs felt rushed. Everything seemed to go faster than necessary, I guess that is was most because of the fast drum patterns. No, the songs were basically not as good as you thought they were, the songs were rarely catchy and there was not a heavy feel in the material.
MY CONCLUSION
There you ave it, I hope this was a good reading and you are welcome to comment this review. Well, to me it sounded like this band was starting to show signs of fatigue. In their debut album there was a fire, in this album the fire was staring to slowly burn out. There was though some songs that I thought were good but I think this was not a good album, not bad but still not good. I would describe this album as a typical one-night-stand because you might listen to this one time and you realize that this was to no good. I would recommend this album to
Forbidden fans and maybe to other metalheads as well but I don't think that serious metal fans would enjoy this.
RECOMMENDED TRACKS
-- Step By Step
-- Twisted Into Form
The overall album will be a sad 2.5/5
