The album starts with Oblivion, a track with spectacular catchy chorus and great nearly calm music. It is a completely new Mastodon, this band grows literally with every note. Second track Divinations is the first single, it is fast, has a great surf rock style guitar solo and another great chorus. Next one labeled – Quintessence, finally starts the journey into a progressive void, where songs follow each other very naturally. The closing one 13 minute epic – The Last Baron is the bands best song to date, showing everything that this band is capable of, especially the impressive drumming.

The band Ignite from California is one of the best representatives of this genre and their 2006 release Our Darkest Days is the best plate to start if you are interested in melodic hardcore. It is a pack of fast and melodic songs that still manage to put some ideas in you head. The great thing about Ignite is that the vocals are not traditional for hardcore and you can’t clearly see the influences of these guys. A great record indeed.

Yeah sounds stupid, but when lots of metals are already invented it’s hard to think of something new, but they managed not only to think but to do it. Their debut album Captain Morgan’s Revenge was released in winter 2008 and gained lot of attention from the metal press. The band also gained a spot on the best metal festival in the world Wacken Open Air.

The music is a mix of power metal, heavy metal and folk metal. Nothing new actually I heard it from veteran bands like Halloween, Rhapsody and never bands like Turisas. Alestorm are just giving it an interesting pirate twist. The lyrics are sung in a pirate manner about pirate stuff (treasure, gallows, maps etc.) and the melodies are influenced by celtic folk, old sea ballads and oh gosh some pop pirate imagery. Well the only bad thing is that Alestorm are lacking some catchy songs, the whole album is nice, but I think they will show more on the next one.

Yeah the Flower Of Scotland cover sounds nice and salty.

The starting song – Big Guns is a Bon Jovi styled glam hit with awesome lyrics and total late night heat. Next three Sweet Little Sister, Piece Of Me and Can’t Stand The Heartache continue this awesome vibe of alcohol, fast cars and fast love. While Motley Crue and Cinderella were always not very metal, Skid Row is exactly the great mix of glam vibe and metal manhood. Next song 18 And Life (awesome to play in Guitar Hero by the way) is a great ballad one of the few stops on this mad record ending with a spectacular Midnight – Tornado. And I also need to mention the hit Youth Gone Wild, a party smasher, a riot song, today it still sounds fresh and great, beautiful single by Sebastian Bach and Skid Row.

The record is very groovy, of course the trademark Motorhead style songs are still there (Rock Out, Runaround Man), but English Rose is a real raw bluesy rock song, very experimental for the band that is active with the same sound for like 33 years. Songs like Heroes, When The Eagle Screams and Teach You How To Sing The Blues are the core of this record, memorable choruses, nice lyrics, awesome voice of immortal rock legend Lemmy Kilminister. Even some stoner rock parts are there. So if you want you can catch the spirit and the attitude of real raw English rock with this great record.

Well actually no one knew what to expect from this record after the raw St.Anger and simpler Load and Reload no one expected Metallica to turn back to the roots and the composing of their 80^th records. The whole album steps away from the standard structures and replaces them with complex pieces of killer riffs with mighty interludes and thank god great solos. Starting with That Was Just Your Life the album unleashes a wave of complex and fast thrash metal followed up by The End Of The Line. James Hetfields vocals sound much better on this record and Rob Thujillo shows the bass guitar that this band lacked for the last years. My personal favorites are All Nightmare Long and the spectacular instrumental piece Suicide And Redemption. The weakest point is The Unforgiven III, I expected more.

So basically this is the best Metallica album since The Black Album, if you still doubt give this plate some mere spins and you will get it.

The six members of Dragonforce are all spectacular musicians while the main task of bass and drums are to keep up the speed, the guitar platers Tom and Herman are spectacular shredders praised with lots of awards from metal and guitar magazines. Their skills are really amazing. The vocalist ZP and the keyboardist Vadim are keeping the fantasy mood of the record with great melodic singing and keyboards that are sometimes far more interesting that the standard power metal.

With their latest released Ultra Beatdown, they once again proved that they are unmatched.

Black Tide is one of the new breed of young bands playing good old metal. They combine heavy metal with thrash, speed and little bit of glam metal making a mix of catchy choruses, nice riffs and impressive guitar work. Their debut work Light From Above is a good breath of fresh air on the heavy metal scene, yeah it’s actually radio friendly but it has the spirit that most underground bands don’t have.

The album includes dynamic songs like Shockwave and Let me mixed with more hairy songs like Shout and more ballad style Black Abyss. A good number is cover of Hit The Lights (originally by Metallica), a real cover reminiscent of the early metal militia versions of this track. So for those who think that metal is dead… you are wrong!

No way. Everything starting from the Victorian Gothic to 80^th glam is becoming cool for the huge masses of underground music lovers. This article is about a new-old band that is truly Blessed by a Broken Heart.

These guys took the modern mtv metal coined by bands like Atreyu, Avenged Sevenfold and Bullet For My Valentine. A glimpse of hardcore, punk, clean vocals, catchy melodies… way to lame. Dozens of bands are starting with this stuff nowadays but not these fellows. They took a large part from the 80^th. Not only the glam metal influence that is also becoming more and more a sell out thing, but also the good old synths. It’s like the soundtrack of Beverly Hills Cop meets Bon Jovi on a metalcore show. With their latest release Pedal To The Metal they’re really burning tires and heating up amps, nice bad to check out.

Heaven Shall Burn are a contemporary death metal band from Germany. Fro those of you who don’t know, death metal is one of the extreme metal subgenres and deals with the themes of death (not surprising), suffering, torture and all the other groovy stuff invented by normal people. In the mid 90^th death metal spawned melodic death metal, more melodic variation of the cookie monster vocal madness. HSB are a new step, they take melodic death metal (in the vein of acts like At The Gates and In Flames) and mix in with modern metal and hardcore. The mix is pretty nice actually and as all the good bands from this scene they are very energetic live.

I was on their show on Wacken open air 2007 and they literally had total madness on the festival ground. Giant circle pits and walls of death (if you don’t know what it is, check out Youtube) and tons of energy.

In addition to this I can say that Heaven Shall Burn is one of the bands that really care. They are political activists, animal rights protectors and vegetarians. Mixed with good Swedish influenced music it makes them one of the best bands to start with in modern metal scene.