Merciful Angel

Space Eater is a thrash/speed metal band from Belgrade Serbia. ‘Merciful Angel’ is their debut album recorded in 2007 immensely helped by the fact that they blew away the competition the previous year at Serbia’s annual guitar fest in the town of Zajecar.

The intro titled MCMXCIX is an excellent atmosphere raiser and conveyer of what the theme of the album is about. For those of you who don’t follow politics but might be interested in the albums theme the intro’s title is the year of N.A.T.O’s bombing campaign of Serbia and ‘Merciful Angel’ was the name of that campaign. Wailing sirens with nice leads and an excellent bass and drums backing really couldn’t have been done better.

‘Bombs Away’ starts in classical speed metal manner and keeps on going. The high vocals you’re either going to love or hate. This is where you’re going to make up your mind. The guitars shred, the bass line might follow the guitars a bit too closely and the drums are maybe a bit too simplified. Nevertheless a very good song for lovers of the speed - thrash genre.

‘Overkill’ is better written and structured than the previous song. Left guitar, right guitar, bass line! Bang! Shredding anybody? More variance in vocals and an awesome break that leads into a solo, some oriental licks and the song is gone.

‘Deceitful Eyes” revolves around a nice triplet tune, typical galloping. Power chords into the chorus and a very nice harmony leading into a solo. If you’ve decided positively towards the vocals than you’ll probably find the chorus catchy. Reminiscent of Bruce Dickinson in some ways!

‘The one’ sounds too familiar in chord structure as ‘Bombs Away’. The drumming isn’t convincing enough here. Too straight forward! Even though the guitars and vocals hold their own the band should have focused more on the excellent mid section. The singing is very convincing here and may cause a rush of adrenalin, very well done.

‘Afterlife’ starts with an interesting lead and slowly builds up momentum to some impressive vocal work. The drumming is much more thought out here compared to previous songs. While simple structurally the song is easy for digesting. A deceleration into the mid section followed by some fancy solo working that really shows a Maiden influence. The ending of the song further adds weight to this!

‘Death from below’ is one of my favorites. The song seems better written and each instrument seems to build on each other rather than blindly following the main rhythm. The lyrics are also a rude awakening for the ignorant of world affairs. An absolutely genius mid section followed by a solo and an orgasmic guitar harmony!

‘Operaphobia’ hits the floor running. While true to the genre the drums seem a bit oversimplified and the riffs a repetitive and not very inspiring. Sadly this song has nothing going for it and should have been left of the record.

The title track ‘Merciful Angel’ a rewritten ‘Bombs Away’ and ‘The one’. While this could be considered their signature style it might seem repetitive to many. While the thyme of the song is the same as those mentioned I myself consider this a sign of shortage of ideas. The highlight of the song once again is the midsection followed by vocals to a nice acoustic guitar rhythm. The band should focus on writing more freely around ideas such as these.

‘Space Eater’ the song titled after the band’s name. Songs like these should always be of extra quality to do the band justice. And bands usually try to give it that extra something for listeners to remember them by. Seeing that Space Eater was influenced by Iron Maiden and Overkill this is understandable. So how does the song sound? Well it’s not their best off the album. An average song that doesn’t do justice to such a decision! The highlight of the song is the singer’s vocal capacity at the end of the song. Apart from that the song is easily forgettable as it doesn’t have any X-factor to it.

I awarded ‘Merciful Angel’ 77. This album is an average sounding piece of work that hardcore fans will love as the songs are very true to the genre but on the other hand the average listener might overlook because of this same reason. Though it has a few really chilling moments of metal mastery it seems to be missing that extra something. Maybe the drumming should have been more various and some more time spent on writing fresh ideas to avoid repeativeness. Not a bad effort for a debut though and I’m sure the band will improve as they grow even though the tragic death of Space Eaters vocalist Bosko Radisic in a fire might have stunted the band somewhat. Hopefully his legacy will remain strong in Serbia’s metal community further enforced with the bands future endeavors.

I'm not sure why, but it seems that every new underground thrash band sounds a lot like Nuclear Assault (when they're not sounding like Sepultura). Space Eater is one such band who sounds like the former, with an oldschool, punk-influenced thrash sound clearly very influenced by Nuclear Assault. In actuality, Space Eater might sound more like Nuclear Assault than any other of that band's large set of modern clones, with almost identical vocals, riff stylings, and guitar tone employed. There were moments on 'Merciful Angel' where I had to make sure that I hadn't accidentally received a copy of 'Game Over' in the mail instead. I guess that's impressive from one perspective, but it's more confusing and droll than it is exciting for me.

There's a sort of pyramid scale that defines one's interesting in 'Merciful Angel'. At the top are Nuclear Assault fanatics who will love anything that completely clones that style of punky thrash metal. Those people will undeniably love 'Merciful Angel'; it's just another early Nuclear Assault album, with more riffs, more yelpy vocals, and more punky rhythms. The next step down are die-hard thrash fans, who will probably really like this, though not as much as the next tier up. What Space Eater plays is a really narrow and repetitive type of thrash, but if you're a fan of the genre, you'll probably enjoy it more or less. The pyramid slides down predictably from there. I find myself at approximately the third tier: people who aren't that into thrash but do like metal in general, and so my opinion of 'Merciful Angel' falls into the realm of 'mercilessly okay'. It's kind of hard to talk about an album that's essentially a pure clone of previous work, so it's not like I can praise it on the grounds of creativity or really damn it as far as quality goes.

The worst thing that I can say about 'Merciful Angel' is that it's really a completely unnecessary album. I bet a lot of you are reading this and wondering where all the musical description is, but there IS NOTHING TO DESCRIBE. If you're heard a Nuclear Assault album, you've heard the entirety of this release. This adds precisely NOTHING to the equation, apart from being Serbian. It's not really BAD, it's just completely average and unnecessary. Who can honestly say to themselves, apart from Nuclear Assault obsessives, "BOY OH BOY I COULD REALLY GO FOR A SERBIAN NUCLEAR ASSAULT CLONE RIGHT ABOUT NOW!" I'm pretty sure no one, and those that can probably own 'Merciful Angel' already. I can neither recommend nor decry this album. This is almost as middle of the road as thrash can possibly get.

When all else fails, one has to fall back on simplicity and focus on competency versus innovation. Space Eater adhere to this rule, they're merely competent not to mention having a name that is utter nonsense no matter what angle you take it from. To describe their sound is again, simple; a combination of NWOBHM with some modern sensibilities, heavy metal that does nothing particularly interesting but doesn't fail too spectacularly either. In fact it's blandness is on such grandeur levels that I have trouble recalling the second half of the album, but to be fair they are but a simple heavy metal band and their songs hardly evolve beyond simple structures that are repeated ad infinitum.

However that is not to say this is a bad thing since at the very least they are decent enough to compose these songs with a good selection of varied riffs that whilst obviously borrow from the past but avoid the stigmata by being somewhat original I guess, at least more so than bands such as Fueled by Fire. Songs such as 'Bombs Away' and 'Deceitful Eyes' resonate heavily in my memory due to having catchy choruses filled with their wailing vocalist, who is at least decent in the ranges that he stays within. Their riffage is also nominal, especially the bridge leading up to the solo in 'Bombs Away'. The riffs tend to skirt around a few notable types; gallops, speed metal and such. Another notable feature, which was no doubt taken as a homage to Iron Maiden, is the prevalent bass lines unfortunately for a lot of songs they can be rather bland and unimaginative with the occasional lick here and there worthy of noticing. The solos are competent but could stand to be a bit longer and more constructed, they seem to be a feature of some songs simply because a heavy metal song needs a solo; case and point being 'Death From Below'. Another Maiden-esque feature is guitar harmonies which admittedly by this point are becoming a bit trite, in fact the only band I really let get away with harmonies and the likes these days are pretty much Slough Feg, but being so fucking awesome they're allowed to fuck with the rules. As per protocol they tend to come in at the end of one of the solos in the song, usually the last one.

'Operaphobia' is probably the best song on the album and manages to avoid a lot of pitfalls just previously mentioned; it's fast, has back-to-back solos, catchy choruses and simple but effective riffing. It sticks to being under 3 minutes but this works exceptionally well to the band's advantage, and whilst I shouldn't deter bands from attempting songs in the 4 - 6 minute ranges I really do enjoy when bands hit their niche in terms of time management. Some of the songs on the album could really do with cutting down, perhaps even removing a riff or two and making a completely new and most likely better song out of 'em.

When you listen to 'Merciful Angel' don't expect too much, the band shows an awful lot of promise but until they really begin to craft their own sound they're doing little more than pissing around with a lot of left over ideas from the heyday of NWOBHM. It's akin to watching a child wearing his older brother's hand-me-downs but trying to act as though he's 16 years old and thinking he's just as cool. Ultimately it's amusing but dear fucking god, he looks like such a little wanker.