Label: High Roller Records
Release date: 06.06.2014
Production: Cloven Hoof
Album length: 48:32 min
Genre: Heavy Metal (N.W.O.B.H.M.)
Rating: 9.0 / 10
Cloven Hoof are considered metal elders! Really, one of the first-generation metal bands on the planet. They’re part of the so-called New Wave of British Heavy Metal, the wave that set the British Isles on fire at the turn of the seventies into the eighties. It’s wonderful to see quite a few bands from that era enjoying a spring-like renaissance today. Excellent new studio albums have recently come out from Hell, Demon, Blitzkrieg and Satan. Now Cloven Hoof are here too. That’s with just their fifth album of the career, mind you, but you have to keep in mind that the band lay completely dormant throughout the nineties.
After Cloven Hoof released their fourth studio album “Eye of the Sun” in 2006 and made a radical shake-up of the line-up, with bassist Lee Payne as the only original and founding member from day one and the legendary Russ North up front on vocals, it first looked like they’d entered a period of stability. And yet, no! Something was off, and North’s exit from the band in 2010 made that clear, even though they’d been touring Europe more intensively again through 2008 and 2009. Without North on vocals, the band released the EP “Throne of Damnation” in 2010, with Matt Moreton, just like on “Eye of the Sun”, handling the vocals again. Moreton had to leave the band for good because of health problems. Grotesque as it sounds, it’s (sadly) also true that Russ North will never sing for Cloven Hoof again either. After Cloven Hoof managed to bring the guy back into the fold as a permanent member in 2012, he fell out almost “to the death” with his longtime comrade, the band’s boss Lee Payne, and left Cloven Hoof for good, saying he’d never come back and wishing Payne the best of luck in all his future musical endeavors.
Payne, who in the meantime had once again overhauled the line-up, changing it completely yet another time, finally seems to have found trustworthy collaborators and like-minded disciples, and with them he could head into the studio with a clear conscience to record new material, which later? Became, of course, the album “Reisist or Serve”. In 2011 he was joined by the excellent singer and lead guitarist Joe Whelan and “auxiliary” guitarist Chris Cross, and in 2012 the line-up was completed by new drummer Jake Oseland.
And the result? Lee Payne knows exactly what he has to deliver. “Resist or Serve” keeps the sparkle of the most authentic ties to the golden days of N.W.O.B.H.M., when metal was young, a wild cry of rebellion and defiance against conformity, hungry to conquer the musical globe, while also delivering the traits of modern sound production. The sound is alive and bristling, the guitar phrases form a biting, massive wall of sound that tears everything down unstoppably in its dense, distorted saturation! At the same time, Payne is such a seasoned master that he understands and knows how to recapture the typical character of the old-school vibe that’s unique to the NWOBHM wave and its best-known bands. Alongside the unmistakable pomp, he managed to catch a real “punk” grit in the sound, which sticks to the representative sound of the elemental N.W.O.B.H.M. days.
Joe Whelan’s vocals are clean, commanding, explosive, convincing in every register. The lyrics, typically steeped in the occult, witches and questions about life after death, naturally have Cloven Hoof racing toward cataclysm and doom. In short: the album’s atmosphere is dark and sinister. Cloven Hoof carry their great sense of musicality and deep understanding of melodic principles into a whole galaxy of polished guitar harmonies laid down in thirds. The middle instrumental sections are seasoned with superbly sharp solos that the two guitarists toss back and forth with feather-light ease. There’s a heap of detail, and the solos carry the distinctive stamp of both guitarists’ work. Intros are often decorated with extra sound effects (the sinister, horror-flavored Mutilator), and the guitarists also add ornamental flourishes of colorful lead passages to the openings and endings of songs, and Cloven Hoof succeed tremendously by restoring the fundamental hallmarks of their own music, which are built on the cult first three studio albums released in the eighties.
Clearly, band leader Lee Payne chose his collaborators really carefully this time. And with that vision he reached an extraordinary goal. “Resist or Serve” is a phenomenal new studio album from Cloven Hoof. It radiates freshness, inspiration, the band’s untamed rebel attitude! Even at a mature age, when you’d expect the guys to finally “get serious.”
“Resist Or Serve” is a classic, rock-solid heavy metal record that actually has everything a real classic heavy metal album needs to enchant you in an instant with its conviction and authenticity. It blasts you straight back to 1980! The band embodies all of this very effectively, with brilliant ideas for building ravenous guitar riffs, a coherent sound reflecting the excellent chemistry of the quartet, a high level of polish in the decorative elements (guitar passages), and crafty shifts of mood, which the band also creates by often changing the basic tempo (rhythm) within a song. That’s also the guarantee of the album’s exceptional dynamic flow and the way things unfold.
The band promises a new European tour this year. “Resist Or Serve” is an album that gives a real lesson to freshly baked metal bands, one of extraordinary inspiration and, most importantly, this: with it, Cloven Hoof have kept all the hallmarks of their metal recipe, upgraded it with a partial update of their sound, and so confidently carried their musical character into a new decade of creativity. This year marks exactly 35 years since the band’s formation! Let’s just hope that creative spark doesn’t die out, and that the band puts out the next album within three years of “Resist Or Serve” so we don’t have to wait another eight years, which is how long passed between the new album and its predecessor “Eye of the Sun”. The key difference between the predecessor and the new album, though, is that “Eye of the Sun” didn’t radiate such a genuine bond between the band and its musical beginnings, say the debut “Cloven Hoof”, as “Resist or Serve” does.
author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Track list:
1. Call Of The Dark Ones
2. Hell Diver
3. Deliverance
4. Brimstone And Fire
5. Northwind To Valhalla
6. Mutilator
7. Anti Matter Man
8. Cycle Of Hate
9. Premature Burial
10. Austrian Assault
Line-up:
John Whelan – vocals, guitar
Chris Coss – guitar
Lee Payne – bass guitar, backing vocals
Jake Oseland – drums & percussion
