Drama and dazzle are at the centre of this, the third album from hyper-speed metal band Armory out of Gothenburg, Sweden. I do believe one or two bands may have come from Gothenburg over the years.

There’s a retro feel about this. As Armory race off with their pulverising melodic hooks, I find myself in a place between Skid Row and Hawkwind. It’s Hawkwind for the psychedelic element. This is down as a sci-fi concept album, and “Deep Space Encounter” lives up to that billing but whilst I get some of that, what I hear is rampant crowd-pleasing metal melodies above all. The singer has a strange, higher-in-the-range wavering voice, but it’s the action in the instrumental department that’s most striking. It’s far from simple. In fact I struggled with the complexity of the song structure of “Event Horizon”. Armory pour it all out dramatically. I love that riff on “Journey to Infinity” and love the power and energy in general, but found the vocals a bit screamy. For something that should be hauling me along like a stiff breeze, I was finding this album hard going. The rush of blood I was looking for did indeed come on the rapid-fire “Message from the Stars”. Now that was fun, and I’m out of breath. I guess the vocals were a sort of cosmic chorus, but that wasn’t working for me. The rest did, and it occurred to me as I listened to a smoothly integrated guitar solo that this is less about those solos, as it could have been given the style, but the songmanship. Credit to Armory for that.

Sophisticated speed metal is the order of the day again on “Music from the Spheres”. I still couldn’t make out if the vocals were meant to sound surreal and even a little bit punkish but no matter, there’s an absolutely magnificent lush, atmospheric passage to invade our minds before the normal thrashing service resumes. On we fly with “The Hunters from Beyond”, a bundle of energy with a bit of hardcore about the chorus. That was fine but it was nice to listen to the purely instrumental romp of “Transneptunic Flight”. From romp to pomp as “Void Prison” struts out its instrumental chest. “Wormhole Escape” starts with a darker edge and a strident riff. It gets into stride and as many before it, it is dynamic but stylistically a metal mixture, leaving me to wonder whether it’s structural mastery or something too complicated for its own good.

Instrumentally this is energetic and flamboyant but leaving aside the song titles, I missed the sci-fi theme and in general didn’t enjoy the vocals. My suspicion is that Armory are a great live band, but whilst I appreciated the musicianship and pomp of “Mercurion”, this album didn’t hang together for me.

(6/10 Andrew Doherty)

https://www.facebook.com/armoryofficial

https://dyingvictimsproductions.bandcamp.com/album/armory-mercurion