Artist: Pegazus
Label: Black Leather
Release: 2011
Runtime: 52:05
Rating: 3.5/5
Pegazus are one of those metal bands that popped up on the scene in the second half of the nineties, riding the general “revival” wave. That wave shot a whole bunch of new bands into the spotlight of metal crowds who were, at the time, craving a turn toward melody. At the front line of the Euro power metal movement, shaped mostly by new bands from Scandinavia led by HammerFall. Among the many promising new bands that soon managed to land an important deal with Nuclear Blast were the Aussies Pegazus. That’s how they successfully brought their music closer to European crowds. Their second studio album “Wings Of Destiny” graced every Nuclear Blast sales catalog in the late nineties, and the label pitched Pegazus as a hot new band, sworn to old-school metal triviality. In a short span of four years, Pegazus racked up three studio albums for Nuclear Blast. They were marked by a maturing step up each time. Every album they put out was better than the one before. Then, in 2004, Pegazus broke up.
For those of you who maybe didn’t catch the band in 1998 on the joint tour with HammerFall, the paragraph above should make a very welcome intro to the Pegazus point. After five years of deadness, the band started kicking again in 2009, with original singer Justin Fleming back in the lineup. He had tried out his vocal cords for Pegazus only on the band’s self-titled debut from 1995. The reunion showed that the band hadn’t lost its creative spark, and so in the first half of this year their fifth studio album arrived, titled “In Metal We Trust”
Never mind that both the title of the new album and the cover art itself feel stiff, chewed-over and a phrase worn thoroughly threadbare, and that the title shamelessly rips off the classic Y&T album “In Rock We Trust” (1984). The title makes that much more sense once you add in the band’s need to reaffirm its name on the scene. Above all, a band that’s now doomed to play small club rooms in front of a handful of the keenest power metalheads is doomed to look for a new base of fans. Especially among freshly baked power metallers.
“In Metal We Trust” is the logical successor to the legacy rounded off by the album “Headless Horseman”. On the new album, Pegazus carry over their brand of power metal, built on the raw, primally carved guitar phrases of classic bands like Judas Priest and/or Accept. On top of that they add their understandable sense of pomp and bombast. In that they come across as a bit predictable, but they keep that feeling of “realness” (which counts for the most with metalheads!), and the label of “Aussie HammerFall” still holds up, cheesy one-liners and all.
Bringing Justin Fleming back is a hugely successful move, because compared to past Pegazus work, the vocals sound by far the most convincing this time. Fleming delivers just the right power, and across a wide vocal range he convincingly carries the required combination of melodically authoritative stance and punch. That deepens the dynamics, the tragedy and the melodic hitting power of the songs, whose main driving force is of course Stoj’s guitar riffs! Production-wise, “In Metal We Trust” brings a noticeable step forward in maturity, because the band has managed, to this day, to squeeze out a sound with raw, punchy seasoning that fills out the sonic picture just right. It pulses dynamically, through clearly highlighted contrasts (the snare drum is especially well produced, as is the weaving of double bass into rolling rhythms) between the basic building blocks of the Pegazus sound.
At their core, everything with Pegazus still revolves around Johnny Stoj’s riffs. They don’t bring a revolution, of course, but draw inspiration from the tried-and-true range of classic eighties riff-building. Either way, it’s precisely the production, which as mentioned embodies a nicely lively, at times almost live-show feel, that brings the right expression of metal grit, the core of metal defiance, rebellion and the required veil of tragedy. Metalheads like to call this “true”. So the thing feels real, and the band’s focus, even if it doesn’t surprise, feels genuine in its faith. Just as the riffs seem predictable, the titles, and the lyrics too, keep that much naivety. But it ignites, it doesn’t feel faked! And that counts for the most when you’re walking a path of musical innovation that dates back to the early eighties. From the start to the end of this album. Through the immediate moments of the opening three tracks, or the nicely pulled-off execution of a Judas Priest classic, as well as at the points of bigger bombast and drama theater - say in the songs Haunting Me and the closing Death Or Glory, which draw on past adventures of this kind, like the excellent mini suite Chariots Of The Gods from 1999. “In Metal We Trust” is a really lovely comeback album for the band! It’s the only logical successor to Pegazus’s back catalog. With it the band will hold on to the old fans of its music, and it will surely light a fire in a few hearts of freshly baked power metal true believers.
Lineup
Justin Fleming – vocals
Johnny Stoj – guitar
Cory Betts – bass
Ange Sotiro – drums
Production
Pegazus
Tracklist
1. Metal Messiah
2. Road Warrior
3. Old Skool Metal Dayz
4. We Live To Rock
5. Haunting Me
6. Eye For An Eye
7. Ghost Rider
8. Metal Gods
9. End Of The World
10. Death Or Glory
11. Old Skool Metal Dayz* (extended version)
*…bonus track
