War of the Eight Saints

This album exudes metal. There is a feeling of quality that is great to experience from such an unknown band; superbly solid riffing grabbing attention from the start and strongly underpinning solos, the drumming simple, effective and with good presence in the mix. The vocals are bullet-proof as well, a perfect low tenor with a gruff edge. The band has a strong 80s US power metal feel, which is hardly surprising given that they were around back then. On the technical side they have everything in place, and fortunately the quality of the song-writing is up to this standard as well.

The songs are surprisingly long, averaging around 6 minutes. The speed called for in the song writing keeps things moving along without dragging, and there are always touches such as extended solos with false endings in the middle to keep you engaged. Brilliant energetic stuff, and without any descents into hard rock. Hawkwood opens the album and acts as a good manifesto for their style - strong leads, unstoppable riffs, brilliant vocals. Hill of Crosses is the best song of the album, with a superb build to an all-conquering chorus. Pure anthemic stuff that most bands can’t pull off. Sword in the Stone sees the singer even stronger in this more mid-tempo song, and frankly sounding epic.

Merchants of Force continues this band's refreshing exploration of the style with a great clean intro before the inevitable riff attack. The feeling is that the band is pushing and probing the genre a lot more than some more recently formed retro worship acts, which are more content just to sound old and write compact songs à la Judas Priest's Killing Machine. Another superb extended solo overlaying an interesting strummed breakdown reinforces this impression with the a sudden return to previous levels of heaviness during the development of the solo sounding absolutely thunderous. The band has a brilliant sense of enhancing their music by changing its context.

Metalfire begins with a riff resembling Running Wild's Roaring Thunder, which in turn sounded unnervingly like something from Judas Priest. It works well and confirms how successful and logical their mix of heavy and 80s power metal is. Barabbas? This song destroys all before it. Pure speed, and what a great way to lead into the ten minute closer. At the risk of sounding like a dribbling fan, this song does not disappoint. If anything the extra length gives room for their song writing to become even more epic, and due to the risk of such a long song becoming dull, the band have obviously pulled out all stops to pack it to the brim with great ideas. The feeling of energy and scale make a superb closer and leave you wanting more by the end.

Throughout, the two guitarists demonstrate an immense understanding of how metal works, with immense Iron Maiden-style duels filtered through Judas Priest's less bouncy and earthier sound, which work so well at both high and mid tempo as to at times surprise the listener that such inspired heavy metal can still be written. The songs are unformulaic and mix things up so well that there isn’t a single weak song on the album. The band's reformation is a blessing, bringing a style of music which is scarce nowadays, in an album with great vision, confidence, and complimented by a brilliant production (superbly clear, but not over polished).

As always with hour long albums, there could have been some fat-trimming, but it's rather irrelevent with music this good.

Steel Assassin are yet another 80s heavy metal band parachuting back from the depths of time for a modern comeback, and War of the Eight Saints, the title of this monolithic heavy metal titan, is just a euphemism for "11 ways to kick your sorry ass from here to Jupiter." Aside from the original vocalist, this is the complete band from the '80s, resurrected with a healthy dose of metallic youthful fire, and with new singer John Falzone, who sounds quite a bit like a younger Harry Conklin, they sound pissed as Hell and also powerful and cohesive enough to hold their ground in a metal scene that has changed leaps and bounds since the glory days of this sort of music in the 80s.

War of the Eight Saints is not really a genre transcending record, and it doesn't do anything to build upon the altar it was forged from, but it is one of those albums that just bleeds METAL from every pore, one of those great albums that will get your blood pumping and your head banging in no time. Falzone's vocals are a huge, raging bellow, and quite frankly the man sounds as if he's going to murder you where you stand at any given moment on this disc - he has a great voice for this style of ballsy, riffy heavy metal, and he doesn't falter or weaken at all on the entire 64 minutes of music here. The riffs and leads are the real show-stoppers, however, as they are all certified True Metal Gold of the old Jag Panzer/Liege Lord/Judas Priest school; just blazing, roaring exercises in metallic glory that will never get old. There is no shortage of variety here, from speedy cookers like the thundering "Barabbas" to midpaced headbangers like the opening blast of "Hawkwood" and then to slower, more elaborate epic numbers like "Sword in the Stone" and especially the 10 minute splendor of the ending title track - what a fucking song!

Picking out standout tracks is a moot point, because this is something you have to hear as a whole; this is, after all, over an hour of classic heavy metal, and that is another one of the best things about this - the fact that it's got so much more meat on it than other such albums do. There are so many heavy metal albums that are under 40 minutes long, and while that is not a bad thing, it's refreshing to have something that doesn't leave me wanting more. War of the Eight Saints is a complete package, with enough meat on it's metal bones to leave you too bloated to even think of eating dessert or going for seconds. A satisfying, wholesome and overall consistently excellent effort, and that is much more than I can say for a lot of albums these days.

Originally written for http://www.metalcrypt.com