Blaze Bayley – Promise and Terror (2010)

Charismatic Iron Maiden’s ex-frontman Blaze Bayley returns with his latest album “Promise and Terror”. After the second implosion in 2007 or Blaze, he formed a completely new band and modestly named it after himself (who wouldn’t!). Anyways, the new Blaze Bayley band sounds as good as ever and “Promise and Terror” is a very powerful Heavy Metal release that showcases Bayley’s vocals in almost every single angle possible.

Featuring a very solid band behind him, Bayley is back in full form and his singing sounds as good as it did with Iron Maiden (don’t hate, he is a good singer). The feeling behind the songs is at an all-time high since some lyrics are very personal to Bayley. The overall sound of the album is also very dark and works wonders with his singing style.

First off, Bayley vocals are top notch and provide a very emotional ride through the songs for the listener. His range is very diverse and this album shows him singing hi, low, you name it. Legions of Iron Maiden fans might dislike him, but the bottom line is that he is a great singer and he shows it on “Promise and Terror”.

Like we said before, the music is very dark and heavy. More like a dark-sounding Power/Heavy Metal than your traditional run of the mil Heavy Metal. The guitar work is excellent and it takes the music further, giving the epic feeling that we all want to get when listening to releases like this. It also provides the perfect melodic back drop for Bayley’s vocals.

The bass guitar is pretty standard, but gets its job done similar to the drumming. The thing that we liked about this album more is that the music goes very well with the singing and feels completely incorporated to the ideas behind the songs. It doesn’t have the feeling like with other solo artists that the singer is just singing whatever crap on top of random music.

Overall, we must say that we found ourselves listening to this album more than normal to enjoy the great vocal harmonies (like on “City of Bones”), and the overall dark and melodic aspect of the music. When you pair great music with great singing you get a very solid release and “Promise and Terror” is the perfect example of this.

Release: February 1st, 2010

Country: UK