French band Altered Beast lay down some pretty hefty riffs, groove, thrash, and straight metal in their awesome debut album that features a nice piece of ass on the front cover! I have listened to this a hell of a lot of times before I put down these thoughts, simply for one reason that I feel and hear different things and influences each time I listen to these often timeless heavy tracks. The trash element, backed with a loud, cool bass guitar sound is reminiscent of latter Annihilator material (especially applicable to the style and number of guitar riffs that are ever present) mixed with Death Angel Bay Area deliverance and a small touch of Pantera thrown in for good measure. This is a heavy album; it is one of those albums where you can really hear a band using everything humanly possible to display their influences of where they come from.
Amazing tracks like ‘Vibration’ start the album out proper, and once you overcome the cumbersome timing at the beginning, the track settles down to breath a cool metal beast. Chugging in the background is a massive amount of guitar riffs that were mentioned earlier and then you encounter songs like ‘Jesus Christ and My Motorcycle’. Major ‘Dimebag’ and ‘Waters’ homage in the guitars coupled with a powerful vocal delivery ensures that this is a song that will remain memorable. Whilst the remainder of the album continues in such fine tradition as previously mentioned, I must admit the level is dropped with ‘All I Want Is Sex With You’, but then for those who have not had a fun-factor lobotomy like me, you will enjoy I am sure.
Encountering a mix like this, which is perfect by the way, it is an album that you have to crank up loud, it does seem low in volume, however, it’s not often I hear all the instruments and players at decent levels on such albums, there is no bias towards to guitars, infact I think the bass does rather well on this recording, but before I go and spin this again, you need to check out this album for sure. It may not be original, but it is very well played and well recorded hybrid of thrash, metal and modern groove metal. A stunning debut all in all.
(7.5/10 Paul Maddison)
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