2015 is starting to draw to a close, my window is frosty, and the shops are now bedecked with assorted tacky plastic trees, reindeer, and an army of Santa dolls beckoning to you in the hope of getting you to spend, spend, spend! Oh, how I wish for a simpler time, a happier time, when things weren’t so complicated, divided, and based on thirty second passing fads in a world where a huge portion of the population in the West seems to have the attention span of a four year old on coke and are just looking for the newest fad of the minute.
Well, fortunately for me, the always reliable Metal Blade have released the debut self titled album by Mirror, a band who are more than happy to look to the past for their influences that they seamlessly merge to create a class album that doesn’t rely on tricks and gimmickry to sell, rather relying on musicianship and energy. Formed by tattoo faced bass master Tasos Danazoglou, ‘Mirror’ opens the album with the full on pomp of traditional eighties metal, and era where real men wore jeans so tight you could tell their religion and every solo was delivered with a hi-top trainer planted firmly on the stage monitor, guitar thrust towards the audience like a machine gun launching a fusillade of riffs. This sound continues into ‘Curse of the Gypsy’, the galloping bass having more than a hint of the Harris about it, a feeling reinforced by the twin guitars trading off against each other whilst the drums batter out a complex pattern to drive the whole song forward, the clean soaring vocals of Jimmy Mavromatis completing the formula; hell, if Iced Earth ever change their vocalist again, this could be a solid audition right here.
‘Year of the Red Moon’ follows, the slower pace evoking the early days of Pagan Altar, a Hammond organ threading through the song and turning back the clock, an instrument that is even further to the front of the mix in ‘Heavy King’, channelling the hard rocks stylings of Deep Purple, Rainbow and Dio; I know from their bios and the blurb that arrived that such a look would not be their thing, but the track just creates an image of seventies flares, platform boots and open to waist shiny shirts so beloved of early NWOBHM bands. Those who want their metal more doom laden need not worry, as ‘Madness and Magick’ delivers occult chanting, tolling death bells and Iommiesque riffs aplenty, hooks guaranteed to have heads banging, hair flailing, and studded leather gloves pumping to the sky. For me, the best is saved until last in ‘Elysian’ the longest track on ‘Mirror’ where all the music that clearly influenced the band is thrown into the mix and then set free. Angel Witch solos play between Maiden riffs, the pomp of Magnum and Uriah Heap infusing the lyrics and vocals before the song slowly fades to with the sound of a single plucked guitar.
If I’d been sent this album in a blank sleeve and without any information, I’d happily have believed this was some long lost album by a contemporary of Preying Mantis, the sort of act that vanished after having appeared on one of the Music For Nations compilation albums of my youth, never to be seen again and talked of as one of the great cult could have been acts. Fortunately, that is not the case, and instead Mirror have instead simply created a class album that harks back to the simpler days where, as a great man once told me over a pint or three, “metal was metal, punk was punk, and everything else was shit!”
(8/10 Spenny)
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