Norway’s Shotgun Rodeo released their debut EP in 2012 and subsequently proved fairly prolific, releasing another two discs over the next three years. Fusing various rock styles, 2016’s ‘The New Standard’ is a hard and riff-heavy six-tracker that, influence wise, is sometimes hard to pin down and occasionally just as hard to take seriously. In this respect, Shotgun Rodeo are frustrating. Their sound is full of great riffs that sadly collide to create a mess of hard rock that never quite knows what it wants to be. This EP includes sounds that appear somewhat contemporary at the time of release – with bits of Avenged Sevenfold bubbling under the surface – and yet there are other elements that borrow from thrash’s past glories, as well as occasional rhythms hinting at the most melodic end of something more extreme. And it’s all topped by a fairly old-school vocal. It’s like experiencing Pantera’s ‘Cowboys From Hell’ by way of Skid Row and with added bits of Buckcherry but with less trash…if that even begins to make sense. Needless to say, it should be better than it is.
Tag Archives: hard rock
SAXON – Wacken Festival, Germany 4/8/2016
Saxon are no strangers to the Wacken Open Air Festival. The metal titans have played Germany’s biggest metal festival several times – now into double figures – and have been an almost permanent fixture since 2001.
2016 saw the band returning yet again, this time in support of their twenty first studio album ‘Battering Ram’, released in October 2015.
IRON MAIDEN – No Prayer For The Dying
As the 1990s dawned and Iron Maiden entered their second decade as recording artists, their eighth studio album presented the band’s first real misfire. Sure, 1981’s ‘Killers’ may have used of a lot of leftover material but it had a lot of heart, but ‘No Prayer For The Dying’ (released in October 1990) is the first Maiden release that could be considered bad. Maybe that’s harsh. To put it another way: it is one of those albums which sounds solid enough at first, but dig a little deeper and repeated listens show it to be generally unremarkable. And obviously, compared to Maiden’s previous heights – following a decade where the band could barely put a foot wrong – that’s not so good. Since its predecessor ‘Seventh Son of a Seventh Son’ offered especially memorable material in ‘Infinite Dreams’, ‘Can I Play With Madness’ and ‘The Evil That Men Do’, it didn’t seem like too much of a leap of faith to expect ‘No Prayer…’ to deliver a similar standard of goods, but most of the album sounds genuinely flat by comparison with any of its forebears.
PALACE – Master Of The Universe
Michael Palace made his entrance into the melodic rock world early in 2016 when he contributed some fine guitar work to the second First Signal album. Several months on and with a new band in tow, his eponymous band’s debut teams him up with musicians who’ve played on other AOR projects from Find Me, Houston and even Erika Norberg.
KING COMPANY – One For The Road
Constructed of ex-members of Warmen, Thunderstone and Enfarce, King Company started out their musical journey as No Man’s Land. After a swift renaming they set about recording their debut album ‘One For The Road’ and were subsequently picked up for distribution by Frontiers Records, a label which, at the time of King Company’s first offering was home to Def Leppard, Whitesnake, Journey, Uriah Heep and other classic rockers. If nothing else, King Company found themselves in fine company.