Customer Reviews

Curse Of The Angeleye

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A forgiving enough four stars here for this Russian bands 2005 slab of sonics sent spearing sans self-consciousness from Shadowhost to your speakers. The band here comprises Victor `Anger' Lysy on vox, Alexey Arzamazov on rhythm guitar, Andrew Smirnov on lead guitar, bass by Ilya Egorychev and Sergey Kutaev is in the engine room on drums. The track listing here seems accurate at the time of writing though at this stage Amazon are selling the MP3 album only as opposed to the `real' thing (sorry, old school metalhead here!).

Now to the music - the ten tracks here are fairly middle of the road power metal in most respects and the band have observed their chosen genre well which has allowed them to create their own sound in its image with nary a hair out of place. What I liked about this album however was the fact that though while we've all heard this sort of thing a million times and while Shadowhost doesn't really provide an undeniable reasons to listen to them is that the whole thing hangs together quite well. I didn't find any of the songs forced their way into any of my i-pod playlists but as a piece of background noise this is less... distracting than a lot of power metal can be. That annoying buzzing bee clatter not really being a part of the Shadowhost experience. The various aspects of the music are all blended well with all the instruments being given a share of the sound and the vocals of Victor are not the sort of high pitched squeal that so often can blight these sorts of bands. While he certainly doesn't sound too `angry' and while he doesn't seem to have the depth of, say, Tobias Sammet when he is on song, Victor can do pretty much everything his band needs him to do. If anything, he may lack a touch of authority in the overall vibe of proceedings.

As touched on above, the sound is good, the production doesn't feel cheap to me but then I was aware going into proceedings that this is a small band from Russia, so perhaps I was expecting worse sub-consciously. A full booklet is a nice touch with lots of credits and lyrics and the booklet is bilingual, it would seem everything has been repeated in Cyrillic in the second half of the booket.

If you are a aficionado of power metal but have listened to `mainland' European power metal bands to the point where you can't press play on your copy of Hellfire Club or Visions any more, then give Shadowhost a try as while they are outside the mainstream homes of this genre they give it the ol' college try. But this won't supplant the two aforementioned albums in your power metal pantheon.