XI

Author: Aleš Podbrežnik

Artist: Metal Church
Label: Rat Pak Records
Release: 2016
Duration: 58:02
Rating: 4/5

Metal Church are long-lived American heavy metallers who have been at it together for 36 years now.  “XI”, as the title of their new and eleventh studio album overall already tells you, is relatively few for a band with such a long track record. Countless shake-ups over the years from lineup changes, departures, arrivals, comebacks, etc… all of it brought stretches of instability and, in fact, paralyzed the band more than once for long periods, creatively and live alike. Whatever. Metal Church survived. The only original founding member still aboard is frontman and guitarist Kurdt Vanderhoof, who is also the main source of the new songwriting ideas. For the band’s new era.

Just when it looked like Metal Church had found artistic and live stability in their mature years, having served up the excellent studio album »Generation Nothing« in 2013 and played Tolmin’s Metaldays festival with it in 2014, among other gigs, news hit like a bolt from the blue in fall 2014 that the otherwise excellent screamer Ronny Munroe was leaving. To keep the story of another temporary hiatus from repeating itself, returnee Mike Howe happily saved the day. This is the man who superbly stepped in for the (late) David Wayne back in the eighties and proved to be Wayne’s true vocal clone. Howe’s return means the singer has lent his voice to a new studio album for the first time in exactly twenty-three years, since Metal Church put out »Hanging in Balance (1993) with him.

»XI« doesn’t stray much from its predecessor »Generation Nothing« in style or sound. Vanderhoof and the gang keep up an incredible artistic drive on the new album, and the guitar phrases are once again full-blooded and infused with outstanding old-school moves straight out of the doctrine of American metal. No more, no less. Metal Church are bloodthirsty with this new record too, and they leave no survivors.  Vanderhoof has gathered an outstanding crew of musicians around him, and the name that stands out above all is drummer Jeff Plate (Savatage). The result is an album full of striking riffs honed with razor-sharp passages, while the band steadily and effectively builds dramatic moods across the songs, all of them wrapped in an eternal veil of doom. Vanderhoof and his guitar partner Rick Van Zandt trade a few ultra-fast, explosive, wittily seasoned guitar solos, with which the band, seasoned and lavish, enriches the instrumental middle sections of the songs. Howe is an old friend of the band, and his vocals (after all those years away) work fantastically. Even though you can’t say a bad word about his predecessor Munroe, Howe’s voice, compared with the songs on the previous album, sounds even more polished, and with its screaming nature and relentless biting through the highest registers a human voice can reach, it teases the ear even more addictively. Take songs like Sky Falls In or Blow Your Mind? You couldn’t wish for a better dialogue between this legendary American metal band, working in new times, and its eighties legacy. Tradition lives. Lavishly enriched with the artistic gems of creative freshness. It sounds retro yet potent, the way very few albums from other bands written in a similar genre format sound today. 

There’s a ton of material. Maybe even too much. A forty-minute album would have been enough. There’s almost a full hour of material here. Still, there are no noticeable dips in quality or missteps on the album, and it flows in the glow of remarkable dynamic development. It picks the best from the legacy of the old days and channels it effectively into the present, the essence of the new Metal Church. That way the band keeps its freshness and gives off a sense of youthful fire, hunger and the urge to prove itself. »IX« is an album that can stand proudly alongside the band’s classic works, led by the albums released in the eighties, like »The Dark« and the debut »Metal Church«. An album tailor-made for the band’s longtime followers, and one that will surely ensnare freshly baked fans of the old American school of approaching the magic of the heavy metal universe too. Let’s hope this album brings the band to some European tour.

Metal Church – No Tomorrow (official video):

Line-up

Mike Howe  – vocals
Kurdt Vanderhoof – guitar
Rick VanZandt – guitar
Steve Unger – bass
Jeff Plate – drums

Production

Kurdt Vanderhoof

Track list

1. Reset
2. Killing Your Time
3. No Tomorrow
4. Signal Path
5. Sky Falls In
6. Needle And Suture
7. Shadow
8. Blow Your Mind
9. Soul Eating Machine
10. It Waits
11. Suffer Fools