Hey, new Alestorm is upon us. Sixth full length album is out and these Scottish/Hungarian hehe maniacs never stop delivering their mixture of melodic power metal and pirate metal. I have seen Alestorm play live once here in Croatia supporting Sabaton and was in awe with their energetic and party show, especially with their frontman/keytar man Chris and how he manages to involve whole crowd in show. This one offers eleven songs of melody, energy, battle, drinking, humor and a bit of irony with some pirate no future-live in a moment philosophy delivered through the lyrics between the lines. I love the song Magyarország with Palinka for everyone shout because our part of Croatia is at Hungarian border and I can relate to this song very much. Also, my personal favorites are The Battle Of Cape Fear River, Under Blackened Banners and the title song, haha being a nice hommage to Maiden and their classic legendary album. If you are into bombastic choruses, sing along parts, great energy, this is superb album.
After the album called Coat Of Arms, drummer, both guitarists and keyboard player of Sabaton left the band and formed another, called Civil War. Swedes continued in a way where they left off with their previous band, but also continued in a bit less melodic and bit more metal oriented harsher war metal style. Lyrics deal with warfare and battles throughout the centuries with some keyboard based melodies on top of guitars like in Dead Man´s Glory which kind of reminds me also of folk metal songs. Musicianship is awesome, especially keyboards, courtesy of former Sabaton man Daniel Myhr. This is the first full length album with new singer Kelly Sundown Carpenter, who replaced Nils Patrik Johansson and sounds high pitched, yet melodic and versatile enough for such music not to be sunken among all the mediocre ones. Songs like Andersonville, Warrior Soul, Battle Of Life or the title song, Invaders are sure to make your old metal warrior´s heart beat faster. This is great metal record by great band.
Knight & Gallow are hailing from California and after releasing one single and demo this is their first full length opus. This one contains intro and eight songs. Knight & Gallow play a mixture of heavy metal done in old school style if I must compare it to some bands it would be a more nwobhm version of Cirith Ungol or little Manilla Road, but the trouble I have with these songs on the album is they sound all too similar and they just didn´t reach that my inner vibe and touched my metal heart in the way they were supposed to. Lyrically band is varied between Tolkien, vikings, crusades, gods of war and all other merry themes. There are three songs that stand out for me above rest of the material, those are Stormbringer´s Call, Blood Of Wolves and Black Swordsman with blast beat part and almost thrash power metal solo and melody. This is a decent debut, we will see what the future brings.