Primal Fear’s 16.6 (Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead) is the perfect example of an album that takes more time that usual to be digested and appreciated. When I listened to it in the first place, I didn’t like it at all. And now, approx. 2 weeks later, I can’t remove it from my car’s CD player.

16.6 is another excellent piece of power metal music by Germany’s Primal Fear. Ralph Scheepers and co. follow the musical trail that was set with the previous album Bad Religion. We can easily hear the heavy influences of Judas Priest on Primal Fear’s music. Power metal at its best, thunderous guitar riffs and ferocious drum beats, 16.6 possesses everything that a fan of this genre (including me) will undoubtedly appreciate. Let’s say it: 16.6 kiss asses!!!

Riding The Eagle, Six Times Dead, No Smoke Without A Fire, Night After Night, Hand Of Time (a ballad!!!), Cry Havoc and Scream are among the best songs of this album (because I have to name only a few of them – hummm…). I’ll rate it 8.5/10 but I could easily give it a higher score.

And if I can give you an advice, to fully appreciate the subtleties of 16.6, try to listen to it using a pair of good headphones, it’s worth the try…

When Timo Tolkki announced last year that he was disbanding Stratovarius, he has no idea that the rest of the group would continue its adventure without the group’s founder (and lead guitarist). But they did. And everybody, including me, didn’t know much what to expect from a Tolkki-less Stratovarius because Tolkki was the heart and soul of this finnish metal legendary group. So here we are with a brand new album from Stratovarius called Polaris and this piece of new music is, according to me, just marvelous.

Timo Kotipelto (the group’s lead singer) and his bandmates first hired a new guitarist (i.e. Matias Kupiainen) to replace Timo Tolkki before starting to record Polaris. The first thing we can say from Polaris is that it is a lot better that its predecessor, Stratovarius’ eponymous album. I think that the magic is finally back in the group (the departure of the once-depressive Tolkki must have something to do with that).

The album’s first song, Deep Unknown, sets the pace for this excellent album that mainly offers cosmic-themed melodic power metal music. It is indeed Stratovarius at its best! The melodies are just superb and catchy – the keyboard input from Jens Johannsen is of course helping a lot. And the guitar playing is also very good. Actually I can confirm that Timo Tolkki is never missed on the album because Matias Kupiainen fills the job perfectly.

So the new Stratovarius has succeeded by proving everybody that the group can continue to deliver good music even when an important member of the family is missing. Polaris deserves an excellent rate of 9/10. The best songs of the album are Deep Unknown, Falling Star, King of Nothing and When Mountains Fall. The songs Emancipation Suite (part 1) is also interesting because it is has a similar intro than the song Infinity (found on the Infinite album). Go buy Polaris right now my friends!

The italian goth group Lacuna Coil are back with a new album called Shallow Life. This is a classic Lacuna-type album as its direction is quite the same as their last albums. Not much to say about it. It’s goth, it’s dark! The guitar riffs are maybe more aggressive than usual. We feel that Christina Scabbia is maybe less present on this album as there are more male vocals on the songs. In fact there are a lot of duos. The group tried to include new sound effects on the tracks which sounds cool to me.

Not a bad album, not a groundbreaking one neither. But again it contains a lot of good music . I give it a 7,5/10 score. There best tracks on Shallow Life are Not Enough, I’m Not Afraid, I Like It and the title track.

Here’s a review of Heaven & Hell’s new opus: The Devil You Know. For the people who don’t know Heaven & Hell, it is basically Black Sabbath minus Ozzy and Bill Ward but with Ronnie James Dio and Vinny Appice instead. Heaven & Hell represent the essence of what Black Sabbath was in the 1980s.

I must say in the first place that I really liked Black Sabbath’s Dio Years greatest hits album. I really expected that The Devil You Know would basically sound the same. Buy sadly I was wrong. The new album is, according to me, very poor in terms of melodies in the first place. Maybe this will please the hardcore Sabbath fans but ot didn’t please me at all. It seems that this album contains the same 10 songs with small variations. Man, I need more variety. On the other hand Dio is in full voice so for people who like the guy, it’s cool! Apart from that, not much more to say…

The album is not bad but it is not good neither according to my personal tastes. I can’t give more that a 6/10 rate for it. Two notable songs on the album: Bible Black and Eating The Cannibals.

At last, here’s a new CD review for you fellow readers! It has been a while since I was able to grab a new and interesting metal CD off the shelves. Hammerfall, our favorite swedish metal band, are the ones who finally put and end to the wait. The swedes just delivered No Sacrifice, No Victory for our own pleasure. And God this record is, once again, a kick-ass record!

Threshold, Hammerfall’s last effort, was good but no as good as Chapter V had been. Hammerfall are back on the right track with No Sacrifice, No Victory. Once again, it is not an album that I really liked when I first listened to it but the more I do, the more I appreciate it. There’s no surprise on the album, it’s plain old good Hammerfall-style music including Joacim Cans’ powerfull vocals and Oscar Dronjak’s superb guitar riffs. But I feel that these two guys elevated the level of their “instrument” on No Sacrifice, No Victory.  The new other guitarist, Pontus Norgen replaced Stefan Elmgren seamlessly so we do not feel any “breakup” in Hamemrfall’s music style.

So here we are with another pretty good metal album to listen to for the following months. No Sacrifice, No Victory is the kind of album that you’ll want to keep in your car’s CD player for many hours of enjoyable music playing. I definitely give it a 8,5/10 rate (could even have been higher but well, you know… ).

The hits on the album are Any Means Necessary, Something For The Ages (an excellent instrumental track), the title track, One Of A Kind and the superb cover of The Knack’s My Sharona.