Customer Reviews

Soldiers of Sunrise

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Classic of melodic metal and one of the best fruits of Brazilian metal ever. The lead singer, Andre Mattos, went on to a great carreer on Angra and now Shaman.

This was the first album by Viper, a brazilian rock band who started out playing Iron Maiden hits as teenagers. Eventually they settled into their own style, though maintaining Iron Maiden characteristics, such as speed, interesting lyrics, great guitar and bass, and powerful vocals. The vocals belong to André Mattos, who later on formed Angra, another great band.

1987's Soldiers of Sunrise was the debut album from Brazilian heavy metal band Viper. Most of the band members, including future Angra/Shaman vocalist Andre Matos, were teenagers when they recorded this album, and it shows in the music. Soldiers of Sunrise is essentially the work of some talented kids in a garage with shabby equipment and a stack of Iron Maiden, Judas Priest and Helloween albums.

Soldiers of Sunrise is a fairly basic early European-style power metal album. There is some flashy guitar work, and even at a young age Matos's voice is uniquely memorable, but by and large the album is pretty unremarkable. Actually, it's probably what Stratovarius would have sounded like if they were part of the NWOBHM scene, if that makes any sense at all. It's decent enough for what it is, but it's really only going to be of interest to die-hard 80's metal fans or serious Angra/Shaman/Matos followers.

NOTE: Soldiers of Sunrise has been heavily bootlegged. Be sure you know what you're getting when someone asks you to pay a "collectors" price for this album.

The track listing is as follows:

1. Knights of Destruction
2. Nightmares
3. The Whipper
4. Wings of the Evil
5. H.R.
6. Soldiers of Sunrise
7. Signs of the Night
8. Killera (Princess of Hell)
9. Law of the Sword

This is the first work of Viper, for those who don't know is the first band of Andre Matos (Today in Angra), he was just a teenager here but with a great voice. All the songs are great and the most of them was composed by Pitt Passarel (bassist). The only bad thing in this cd is the quality of recorder and production. But the songs are so great that you forget this silly point.

Bad production destroyed an otherwise good intention by these guys from São Paulo, Brazil. The songs are good, although there's no innovation at all. You can listen clearly that they're Maiden fans which bought guitars to copy the master (or try, at least). Proof of that is Viper's posterior career, which went nowhere, reaching the point where they began to sing in Portuguese...

If you wanna know VIPER, stick to their second album, THEATRE OF FATE. This debut here lacks in production and is just a copy of every imaginable heavy metal cliche they could remember to use at the time.