This is a female fronted traditional metal band from Italy who are a talking point in the underground scene of late, well for me anyway! Their first EP ‘The Beyond’ seems to be quite hard to find now at a decent price, a release that first got me into this band, but rest assured, apart from the cover version that appeared on that release, all of the tracks are included on this debut album.
The sound is like ‘Metal Heart’ era Accept in rather a few places in fact, with early Riot references to my ears. ‘Heavy Metal Possession’ is more heads down metal but there is one of the tracks you can sing the chorus to ‘You Gave Love a Bad Name’….as the melody is uncanny, hence this shows versatility in respect to Sign of the Jackal. Further tunes like ‘Fight for Rock’ are more melodic but still hold true to their metal ideals and should perform the basis for your admiration if the truth be told. My only frustration whilst reviewing this release was to find the tracks tagged by numbers and not name and these differed between the PR page to the metal archives page where I went for reference as the song titles did not seem to match. However, as the songs on this album are so memorable and the lyrics/chorus’ are very easy to decipher, this is not a hard task to rectify, nor will be the listening experience especially with some of the guitar work involved and the mature arrangements that are certainly bespoke to Sign of the Jackal.
As I said before, Accept and also Judas Priest are good reference points and for a relatively young band that have had a good few appearances at festivals like Keep It True etc already. Vocalist Laura Coller has a good range and sounds quite versatile with a real metal singer’s sense of power that is more than applicable to the music. All in all, this is a release that certainly grew on me, once you give the tunes time you will find you will rejoice on their ‘Mark of the Beast’. The album sounds really mature and for a debut, this can only spell good things for the future so long as the ideas keep on flowing. Like Fenriz’ band of the week recommendation – I recommend this one, Sign of the Jackal sound genuine and perform metal in line with some of the great forefathers of this genre, especially in Europe.
(8/10 Paul Maddison)
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