This was Heathen"s first album which shows a lot of musical skills and skilled vocal work as well. Heathen material is based on the sounds from the american thrash-metal scene and the NWOBHM, they emerged in the late 80"s in the "Bay Area thrash movement but they never made a bigger breakthrough. The band plays energic and precise music with skilled and harmonic vocals, this band is easly compared to Anthrax because they also had good vocalsists.
The band members on this album was Dave Godfrey on vocals, Lee Altus on guitars, Doug Piercy on guitars, Mike Jastremski on bass and Carl Sacco on the drums. They all show great skills when it comes to the guitars, frantic and high-speeding riffs and great guitar solos. They play very precise but the guitars sound a bit flat and boring, there is not this heavy feeling to the guitars unless you put a lot of base-frequence on your stereo. The bass is not so hearable on this album but there is no odd tunes or misses, Mike does a great job but the bass is weak and there are no bass solos or even small riff sections on this material unfortunatly. The drumming are good but they are too familiar to other thrash-metal bands, the drum pattern changes throughout the songs and it doesn"t make you surprised in any way. And so we have Dave Godfrey and his vocals, very good vocals, I would say that Godfrey is equaly good as Anthrax"s fromer singer Joey Belladonna.
The songs on the this album is basically just pure energy, there are no slow songs, maybe some short and slow music-sections in some of the songs but otherwise there is just fast songs. Some songs is clearly influenced by the NWOBHM like the song "Breaking The Silence", the intro sound quite familiar to Iron Maiden, "Goblins Blade" sounds also like it has NWOBHM influences. I would say that every song has high-speed shredds and intensive drumming but the there is no big heaviness in the songs. Some highlight songs would be "Goblins Blade", "Breaking The Silence" and "Open The Grave" and those are basically some of my personal favorites.
That"s it, this is yet the only album from Heathen that I enjoy the least. I think that the songs can be a bit annoying because of the high tempo, you may get tired of most of the songs after just listen to them a few times. But this is a band that have great musical skills and a excellent singer. I really hope that they will release more albums in the future. I would recommend this band to all thrash-metal fans but if you like more extreme music this may be a bit lame for you but I can be wrong, if you enjoy Anthrax then you should check these guys out.
PROS
+ Great musical skills
+ Excellent guitar work
+ Very good vocals
+ The whole band is unique
CONS
-Poor bass
-The high intensivness may get you bored
-The songs are not so catchy
RECOMMENDED SONGS
" Goblins Blade
" Breaking The Silence
" Open The Grave
Overall album rating will be a strong: 3.5/5
