First of all we have to disclose that we are HUGE fans of Liv Kristine and we have loved almost every thing she has ever released in her career, until now. “Skintight” shows the desperation of an artist trying to break into ‘mainstream’ music. With Leaves’ Eyes and Atrocity being highly popular and very different musical outlets you would image that such a quality singer like Liv would have enough.

Since 1998, Liv has been releasing stuff promoting her solo career. We loved “Deus Ex Machina” since it was a nice break from her main gig back in those days (Theater of Tragedy) and it featured some nice folk-ish songs with some other pop-ish material mixed in between. Not much came of this (except in Norway) and she went back to releasing ToT albums until she got the boot in 2003. And we feel that her best chance at ‘mainstream’ commercial success was with “Musique” and “Assembly”, some electronic/techno oriented albums that shined with her vocals.

Tristania has always been one of our favorite bands since the late 90’s with their impressive “Widows Weeds” and “Beyond The Veil” albums. Fast forward to the mid 00’s and we have that Morten Veland left the band and Tristania was stuck in a creative limbo releasing somewhat dull and uninspired releases. Lastly in 2007 we got Illuminate, and album that was somewhat decent and marked the last release of the band with Vibeke Stene, the band’s iconic Female singer. Many people gave Tristania for dead after Vibeke left and not a lot of people had confidence that the band would ever return with release solid enough to get them back on top of the Gothic Metal world.

With “Rubicon”, Tristania proves us all wrong (yes, including us). The band’s latest release is as great as we could have ever expected, not like Morten Veland would have done (for this check out Mortemia), but like the ever shape-shifting Tristania only knows how to do: it’s complex, powerful and well designed to keep the listener engaged. With the band’s new female singer Mary Demurtas, we get a more than worthy replacement for Vibeke. Mary’s voice is indeed different than Vibeke, but it has enough power and range to helm Tristania’s female singer crown gracefully.

All the way from Poland today we get Jelonek, the ‘side project’ from violinist Michal Jelonek of Hunter fame. The music of this band is another attempt at fusing classical music with metal/rock elements and create an enjoyable mixture of the two genres while not sounding overly ordinary. Comparisons to Apocalyptica, Elend, Agizia and Ulytau come immediately to our heads but Jelonek easily stands out and cannot be called a cheap clone of these bands.

With no vocals, Jelonek’s self-titled debut album manages to immerse the listener into the beauty of classical music paired with (sometimes) powerful drumming and distorted guitar. This band is different to Apocalyptica in the sense that it approaches music more ‘classically’ then them but at sometimes they sound just like them (i.e. “Machinehat”).

Today we have the Metal Blade re-release of legendary Helstar’s albums: “A Distant Thunder”, “Nosferatu” and “Twas the Night of a Helish X-Mas” is a boxed set that also includes the DVD of “Twas the Night of a Helish X-Mas”. For those of you that don’t know Helstar is a Power/Speed Metal band from the USA that released some epic albums back in the 80’s before disappearing for a while.

All these three releases featured in the “Rising From The Gave” boxed set feature remastered versions of “A Distant Thunder” and “Nosferatu” and indeed these two great albums sound better than ever. We did not receive the 3rd and live CD for review, so we can’t really say much about this part of the boxed set.

For a band that has been around over 10 years, RAM has only released two full-length albums of their brand of traditional Heavy Metal. Hailing from Sweden, if we didn’t have any information about RAM we would imagine that they released “Lightbringer” decades ago. This release features what every die-hard Heavy Metal fan dreams about: an epic old-school Heavy Metal assault that will keep you to the edge of your seat.

“Lightbringer” presents us with 10 tracks that are highly entertaining and super diverse. There is not a single dull moment in this album since each track has enough magic inside them to make them stand out individually, and when placed together we get a top notch release that will surely turn heads left and right.

All the way from Germany today we have Iron Fate and their debut album “Cast in Iron”. This relatively new band features an interesting ‘slower paced’ combination of Heavy/Power Metal with some Thrash elements, we say ‘slower paced’ since this band never goes to 200 mph’s and lacks a bit of the epicness that the genre calls for.

The first thing you will notice about Iron Fate is their extremely versatile (and good) vocalist Denis Brosowski. This front-man can hit notes and resemble almost any Heavy/Power metal vocalist in the scene in a very impressive fashion. While the music behind this great singer is average, we feel that this is what brings Iron Fate down and (for now) stops them from being a great Heavy/Power Metal band.

Hailing from Ireland, Primordial is one of our top 50 bands from all times and “Spirit The Earth Aflame” is one of our all-time favorite albums. When we heard that Metal Blade was releasing this timeless classic we got psyched about the possibility of some great bonus material on this version of the album (we currently have 2 other versions).

If you know who Primordial is, you probably worship this album as much as any other fan of the band and can skip till the next paragraph of this review. If you don’t know who the band is, then we must tell you that this band was one of the first to successfully combine Celtic/Folk influences with aggressive Black Metal elements, giving them a very dark and powerful sound that was unheard off back in the late 90’s and early 00’s.

Recently we have been bombarded by tons and tons of new Thrash Metal bands and it’s getting close to impossible to find any bands worth listening to. The Prophecy23 is yet another one of those Thrash bands that is aiming for a little piece of the pie. We must say that from the countless submissions we get, there is a great deal of quality behind this German band that we can’t seem to find anywhere else.

With a ‘traditional’ Thrash foundation, The Prophecy23 has pretty solid riffing and overall catchy songwriting that makes them quickly standout from all the uninspired cloned bands. The band does not get stuck in the whole ‘lets sound old-school’ approach and actually proposes some interesting changes in their music.

All the way from the UK, today we get on our review queue Ramesses latest crushing releases “Take the Curse”. While we are huge Doom Metal fans, we tend to go for the Death-Doom bands rather than the Sludge/Psychedelic Metal bands. Ramesses falls on the second category and while not our favorite band in the world, they do a great job in creating 10 solid tracks for this new release.

The problem most people might have about Sludge/Doom Metal is the lack of ‘originality’ and diversity than most bands present. We rather look at Sludge/Doom Metal releases from a perspective of effectiveness rather than originality or diversity, and Ramesses is a very effective band in our opinion. The band creates a very bleak and sometimes trippy atmosphere that not everybody pulls off these days.