RAVENSIRE - The Cycle Never Ends
March 29, 2016, 8 years ago
(Cruz Del Sur)
This Portugese band has been impressively consistent since forming in 2010: here they're on album three and are nailing their particular strain of trad metal pretty hard this time around, the band brandishing an approach just this side of completely geeky and dorky but still totally hard-rocking and very much rooted in classic '80s underground/trad sounds. Check out very cool opener “Cromlech Revelations” for a good sampling of everything this band does (at 7 minutes, it's got time): Grave Digger-like roughshod trad, hard goth heroics like early Savatage, and a near-modern galloping horse over to power metal.
But it's power metal with balls, that double time pick-up at 5:10 no accident, indeed, more a warning than anything: this is metal for warriors, and I have no idea what the return value is on something like this or if it'll collect dust on the shelves of my hard drive, but nothing but respect for the ugly, determined sounds Ravensire dish out here. Bio namedrops Omen (!) not once but twice (!!) and considering I listened to Omen last night, I can't help but raise my ale in silent respect to these guys for obviously coming from a similar place of pure love for classic metal.
