Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Artist: Bayley, Blaze
Label: Blaze Bayley Recordings
Release: 2010
Runtime: 55.40
Rating: 4/5
Blaze Bayley, known for earning his bread in one of the most notorious metal bands of all time, has served up a new album this year. It’s his fifth in a row and his second since he renamed his band from Blaze to Blaze Bayley.
If anyone knows what’s classic in metal and what hits hard in metal, it’s Blaze Bayley, one of the finest post-NWOBHM discoveries from Great Britain, a country that’s otherwise totally bled dry when it comes to classic metal these days. In 2007 Blaze Bayley completely rebuilt his crew, line-up and all. The result was the phenomenal 2008 studio effort “The Man Who Would Not Die”, which audiences across the planet received with huge approval and declared his best studio achievement up to that point. Today, with his sheer stubbornness, Blaze has become a byword for a musician who lives his heavy metal sermon with full-blooded passion. Want a radical answer to that eternal puzzler of what’s real and what’s fake metal? Listen to Blaze Bayley and in a heartbeat he’ll scrub every last bit of fake metal filth out of your ear canals.
“Promise And Terror” is an album sworn to the classic heavy metal legacy. Half of the songs are devoted to singing about historical tales and/or fiction, the other half are personal and confessional. The tracks carry a pronounced feeling of sorrow. The album’s distinctly dark face drags the listener, with its honesty, intensely and irreversibly into the whirlpool of Blaze’s personal purification, which lately was driven above all by the tragedy of losing his own wife. You’ll be hard-pressed to find another musician who delivers a sermon in such crystal-clear diction through the shaping of his verses, and who fits so strikingly, with such elemental compatibility, into the anthemic melodies he picks. That’s what kept Iron Maiden alive between 1994 and 1999, or, if you like, what has kept going on its own and independently since 2000, with no job at Iron Maiden. And still, the two are so close in certain aspects of how the material is written that it’s hard to find a metal fan who’d like Iron Maiden but shrug off Blaze Bayley’s body of work. Today Iron Maiden are a corrupt monster that sells every last drop of sweat in glossy vanilla-scented packaging, whether it was squeezed out honestly or “less honestly”, while Blaze Bayley is used to sweating blood. So does he still sweat on “Promise And Terrror”? The answer: “Damn right!” And it’s also damn right that, with his character and sincere attitude, Blaze Bayley will forever be condemned to playing the club circuit. The price isn’t high, considering that nobody has the right to deny him his truthfulness and clear conscience, which his actions dictate.
Where does the leap to a higher level of quality come from, between the albums “The Man Who Would Not Die” (2008) and “Promise And Terror” (2010)? The fact that Blaze Bayley found the right people around him, who also actively take part in writing and shaping the material on both albums, should be enough of an answer. After the superbly received predecessor, the band found plenty of creative drive to stay in the very same compositional territory for the new album. And yet this time, besides the typical feelings Blaze serves up to the listener with no brakes on, they were also driven by grief over the loss of a loved one. That doesn’t mean Blaze has gone soft, though. No way! The opener Watching The Nightsky is the most direct proof. A punchy anthem with every parallel to Man On The Edge or the openers of the Blaze-era albums, it grabs all your attention in an instant with the infectiously melodic dictate of its chorus. In Madness And Sorrow the quintet’s expressive guideline stays on the same level, and Blaze Bayley keep the crushing, classically oriented metal onslaught going through the second track too.
What feels good is the fact of the excellent live-sounding production. The guitars are tuned lower for the riffing, and both guitarists even use seven-string guitars. The riffing forms an aggressive, dark but massive curtain, and Blaze’s one-of-a-kind vocal color, dull-toned and pitched low to mid-range, fits into it like a glove. Blaze Bayley add a rhythmic undercarriage of violent tempo to the delivery, often backed by double bass drum pedals (City Of Bones, Time To Dare), or they work them in skillfully at just the right points, which stirs up the look of the songs and stretches out the character of the album’s dynamics. The musicians are “drilled” to the max. So we get intense interplay in the guitar dialogues of both guitarists, who work as complete equals, while the unpredictable arrangement of notes in the solos is endlessly pleasing, because it springs from the classic building blocks of crafting them, which means leaning on the singular genius of electric guitar giants like Michael Schenker, Randy Rhoads or Tony Iommi.
The guitar grinding doesn’t let up for a moment across the album. Blaze Bayley don’t know the word ballad. Changes in mood are of course dictated by Blaze with his melodies in delivering the verses, and by a lively rhythm section that the vivid guitar passages hang on. Galileo Galilei gets Blaze’s dedication in the song 1633, which tells of the inquisition’s trial against the brave defender of the heliocentric theory. Here the band lays marching, mid-tempo roaring under the riffs, reminiscent of the Saharan wail of Saracen horsemen. God Of Speed is a proud anthem born for the stage, whose chorus burrows under your skin in an instant. Another historical stop awaits us in the song City Of Bones. Here Blaze hasn’t stumbled upon a fossil site of Jurassic duck-billed dinosaurs, but takes us back in time to the siege of Leningrad. The feeling of war’s agony is conjured up in it with real power.
The guitar ornaments, the picking over the riffs, including the harmonies in thirds, are inherited from the NWOBHM days and from their popularization by the brotherly Iron Maiden. Hearing them today on any album, portrayed in such an authentic way, is a true godsend for the listener and the lover of old-school metal played with modern production posture. The track Faceless is about the facial blandness of the average conformist in Western society, and in style and in its expressed core it could easily replace Watching The Nightsky as the album opener. The track Surrounded By Sadness is played acoustically in its first part. It’s an excellent semi-ballad that explodes in the outro and would find a place in the band’s live set without any hesitation.
Blaze Bayley remains a byword for excellent delivery of the metal middle ground between aggressive, demanding punch and melodic anthemic grandeur. Everything is played and sung in such a manner that the emotions actually live and openly challenge the consumer of this album. That’s the most a musician can offer you. The fire of personal purification throws its flames with special vehemence especially in the closing stretch of the album, when Blaze Bayley lead us through the songs The Trace Of Things That Have No Words, Letting Go Of The World and Comfortable In Darkness. The unyielding posture of the songs, which line up in sequence an intense and emotionally charged album, keeps Blaze Bayley at a highly expressive level, skillfully treading in the footsteps laid down by the album “The Man Who Would Not Die”.
There’s only one thing on the album that could have been done better: the production of the bass lines. They’re a bit cowering in the sound and could have been cranked up a little, since the snare drum pushes to the front just slightly too much. The same goes for the double bass drum pedals. They too left some unused room in the spectrum of the album’s sonic picture. Otherwise, there’s nothing to object to in the usual authentic liveliness of the sound of this white-hot manifesto of classic metal.
Two years passed between the releases of the two albums. The band’s evolution stood still here for a moment. But at the same time it couldn’t have gone any other way. That’s the time span in which Blaze Bayley’s personality was caught up in life experiences that many of us wouldn’t dare share with him even in our wildest dreams. For that you have to be strong and defiant. And Blaze Bayley undoubtedly is. The perseverance, loyalty and unyieldingness along this musician’s path are qualities you can’t deny. That’s why the album “Promise And Terror” also remains a manifesto worthy of all respect. It shows no noticeable creative departure from its predecessor, but it keeps its high level of quality across the board and, of course, Blaze Bayley’s one-of-a-kind expressive face. Iron Maiden serving up this kind of fury today remains a pure utopia, and so, once again, Blaze Bayley gives them a proper lesson in this case!
Line-up
Blaze Bayley – vocals
Nick Bermudez – guitar
Jay Walsh – guitar
David Bermudez – bass guitar
Lawrence “Larry” Paterson – drums
Production
Jase Edwards & Blaze Bayley band
Track list
1. Watching the Night Sky
2. Madness and Sorrow
3. 1633
4. God of Speed
5. City of Bones
6. Faceless
7. Time to Dare
8. Surrounded by Sadness
9. The Trace of Things That Have No Words
10. Letting Go of the World
11. Comfortable in Darkness
