Battle Beast | ‘Steel’

Remember Battle Beasts?

Little action figures implausibly shoehorned into the Transformers universe then as quickly taken out once publicity buoyed them into the greedy eyes of the kiddies.

You looked through the back of them to reveal an emblem of fire, wood or water which enabled hours of rock/paper/scissors fun. Well okay, minutes, until you discovered which element yours was and never played with them again.

But now a new Finnish traditional metal band have claimed ‘Steel’ as their own Battle Beast totem and equally implausibly, it wins the game all round. Go Sunburst Warrior!

It’s evident from the very start that this is going to be a fun album, mainly due to the falsetto / vibrato screams of vocalist Nitte Valo – she’s absolutely top notch, mixing Nightwish with WASP and evoking a huge sense of Zed Yago.

Indeed, the entire album is like a sped up Zed Yago or Velvet Viper album. And the cover art of Brown Lion fighting a robot is actually pretty cool when it should by rights be cringeworthy.

Second track ‘Armageddon Clan’ just screams out ‘Holding Out For A Hero’ until Nitte’s high pitched squeal blasts out, contrasting sharply with Bonnie’s delightful croak. It’s the best track on the album, so full of hooks that an almost involuntary fist gets clenched for that defiant “They will never catch me alive!” chorus.

‘The Band Of The Hawk’ strays into pure Alestorm territory melding into unashamed Hammerfall / Blind Guardian worship with a dose of Manowar lyrics. Let’s be honest here from the start – the lyrics are going to be described by everyone as cheesy, and they are, but they’re delivered with SUCH conviction that it’s hard not to grin in metal pleasure. I mean, a set of lyrics like:

Shake the world with metal
Shake the world with steel
Shake the world with Heavy Metal grinding the wheel
Shake the world with metal
Shake the world with steel
Shake the world with Heavy Metal Gods!

They’re lyrics even DeMaio would think twice about, and he’s in Manowar. But there’s such a glorious charm to them and a lot of quite surprisingly good music present that you actually find yourself singing along to the lyrics, it’s so, so catchy.

Nitte’s vocals are nothing short of breathtaking, easily the best female traditional metal singer on the scene at the minute, tons of versatility and lots of character on display.

It’s all about the vocals throughout the album really, the entire pomp of the keyboards and well above average musicianship really only emphasise how great they are; to the extent that the music almost drowns out the singing sometimes to compensate, particularly in ‘Iron Hand’, but as it has a huge Nightwish influence it’s almost to be expected.

This is a total surprise of a debut album, absolutely packed full of nice little hooks, some great guitar work, interesting drumming and fantastic vocals. Check it out.

4.1 / 5 – Dónal McBrien ::: 18/07/12