FINAL SIGN - Hold High The Flame
December 9, 2015, 8 years ago
(Divebomb)
This is a pretty decent slab of traditional metal with a very USA flair to it, the band delivering at first rippin' speed metal (opener “Daring The Sun”) but then switching gears pretty adeptly to a more trad/doom tune, “Burn The Temple Down”, which sounds like any number of '80s greats, and does a surprisingly good job at it. Normally bands like this have singers as a weak spot, but the crooning here is well done, powerful, almost a John Bush-ian vibe to its confidence. The title track is like Savatage when Savatage has the energy to get out of bed, and it’s followed up by the thrashin', Overkill-like “Possessor”, which the band also does capably.
And on it goes, the end result being a sound that is somewhere between everything mentioned above, doing it all well but maybe needing to sound a bit more like one thing instead of so many: it gets a bit distracting when you get fully into the trad/Metal Massacre mode and then some chunky thrash comes along to knock that sound away, you know? Still, gotta hand it to Final Sign: they do each of the sounds with much skill and passion, and this is only their debut.
