Album review : SCREAM MAKER – Land Of Fire

Frontiers [Release date 14.07.23]

Although Polish Melodic Metal band, Scream Maker are usually bracketed beside the bands they have frequently toured with, like Saxon, Judas Priest, Megadeth, Slayer and others, their own material drills down into the DNA of the genre and cooks up its own melodic metal chemistry.

The resulting heavy metal scenery is stark and fearful, but somehow strangely attractive. The two axemen, Michal Wrona and Bartosz Ziolkowski team up with vocalist Sebastien Stodolak in the creation of an album full of dramatic, darkly toned metal, with most notably, ‘Perpetual Burning’ and ‘Can’t Stop The Rain’ transitioning from hi speed, all guns blazing metal to short stretches of slow moving melodic metal in the blink of an eye.

Stodolak attacks each lyric, each song, with a raw, ragged power, cut from the same cloth as his role model, Ronnie James Dio. It’s no surprise to learn that the band stage “Ronnie James Dio Memorial Concerts” throughout Europe, annually.

In the album’s second half, standout track ‘The Rider’ shuffles a step or two away from the metallised mayhem of the album’s first half, taking more of a hard nosed, hard rock stance in the vein of Deep Purple’s seventies sonic blueprint.

Elsewhere, ‘Everybody Needs Illusions’s crashing, overdriven axework propels the song into permanent orbit and on the amazingly intense ‘Zombies’, Studolak’s plaintive vocal lament leads us through some striking twin guitar interplay, reminiscent of Guns’N’Roses. Album standout by a considerable distance. ***1/2

Review by Brian McGowan

Featured Artist: JOSH TAERK

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In 2023 he signed a recording deal with Sony in Canada and released a new single on 15 September.

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Power Plays w/c 11 November 2024

ARCANE MOON Hello Sun (indie)
S8NT ELEKTRIC XTC (Long Branch Records)
ARCANA KINGS Here We Go (Curtain Call Records)
KLOGR face The Unknown (Zeta Factory)
BEYOND UNBROKEN Dance With The Dead (FiXT)
REVENGIN Decadent Feeling (Wormholedeath)

Featured Albums w/c 11 November 2024

09:00-12:00 The Best of 2003-2023 (Melodic Rock)
12:00-13:00 The Best of 2003-2023 (Melodic Hard Rock)
14:00-16:00 The Best of 2003-2023 (Singer Songwriter)