Ελληνικά
Genre : Heavy/Power Metal
Country : United States
Label : SPV/Steamhammer
Year : 2015
Disappointment. Exactly that. I cannot find a more representative word for “Nocturnes of Hellfire and Damnation”. Following the equally disappointing “Black Light Bacchanalia”, I believed that five years later we would have stumbled upon the comeback of this huge band. Unfortunately, Virgin Steele neither this time manage to return to well known paths. Name size proportions calls for proportional quality music. I don’t want boiled metal from Virgin Steele… That’s unacceptable.
Not to expatiate, what you will hear on the new album is a nerveless, tedious 80 minutes journey in DeFeis’s mind (since he edited everything once again); a journey into a tailspin ‘dismal’ ‘atmosphere talking about negative energies, passions, frustrations, desires, and obsessions among people.
In the album you will notice some diffuse blues guitar touches, some progressive elements and many tedious mid-tempo tracks that just don’t do the trick, even if you make your ears bleed from the repetitive hearings and compulsively say that it’s at least “Ok”.
What I consider as the album’s Achilles heel is DeFeis himself.
Mercy on us!!
Where did the Hawk scream go? What are all these feminine screams he makes? Where is the natural tone of his voice? It’s incredibly obvious there’s teasing in the effects on vocals; that’s frustrating! Sudden hispers while singing, fake roars… Needless to say anything about the high notes… Every time I listen to them, it’s painful. It’s a pity. It would be better if he wouldn’t have attempted them, because the voice does not come out the way it used to.
An actual grief. They are still one of my favorite bands, but trying to use technology to prove that they still stand results into throwing us into a vast abyss of absolute mediocrity. They should stop releasing records while they were still on top.
E.Pursino no matter how much he tries, he’s totally drowned in the mediocrity of the album. In some cases he saves some tracks though, at least in the guitar part. Allow me to keep some reservations on the drum section, as I still wonder whether it’s Frank Gilh’s physical playing or it’s a drum machine. With so many effects on the album I’m a bit chary. Also, all the keyboard sections, apart from a few moments that travels you back in “Noble Savage” and “Marriage’s” era, don’t grant anything special.
Four songs stand out and can be heard, the powerful “Lucifer’s Hammer” that opens the album and it can fool you and make you say “holy shit this gonna be good album!” Who would imagine what will follow after the 4th track? “Queen of the Dead”, “Black Sun Black Mass” and the masterpiece “Persephone”; the only ‘’real’’ Virgin Steele song so far in “Nocturnes of Hellfire and Damnation”, reliable and worthy like Noble Savage and Marriage’s eras. For this particular track, yes, congratulations to David DeFeis; he deserves it. The song is a pure Virgin Steel hymn.
But just a single song is never enough for the atonement of a band that wrote and played high quality heavy metal for decades…
By the gods & goddesses the war hammer of Zeus will fall upon you.
2 / 6
