Stygian - Rising Fury (Mortal Music)

You know how pretty much every high school metal band of a certain age (about eighteen months after they've switched from playing pop-punk to hard rock, on average), when asked about their influences, will almost inevitably say the words "Metallica" and "Pantera" within the next five words? No matter what they actually sound like? This is the sound of those kids with a lot more honesty, and a decade of spit and polish behind them.

Unfortunately, Stygian's Rising Fury has not enough spit and too much polish.

This is pop-metal/hard rock, but there's not a single memorable chorus on this album, and those are the things upon which the genre is built. The vocalist is doing his absolute best to sound like Load-era James Hetfield, but even ol' Het at his least ballsy still had a mighty set of balls, and this bloke is nowhere near able to pull it off, leaving the vocals sounding wimpy and forced. The lyrics and the bluesy leads also draw heavily from that mid-90s 'tallica songbook, and similarly fail to hit the spot. Seriously fellas, of all the periods of Metallica to shamelessly copy? I suppose I should be glad you didn't pick St. Anger.

The riffs are all that sort of Vulgar Display of Power sort of heaviness - by which I mean, the band are doing their best to sound like Pantera at the time of that landmark album, but the guitarwork isn't hitting the spot. The production and mixing can be blamed in part for this I suppose. Unlike Vulgar..., which was a very guitar-driven album, the guitars are mixed way below the vocals here, which, as I've mentioned, are hellishly lacklustre.

The super-polished sound on the album also detracts from what the band sounds like it is trying to do; the gloss and smoothness of the guitar sound takes away from any edge the riffs might have had, but I don't think they would have had much edge even if they'd been recorded through a dry-as-hell rig like, say, the one Mike Scalzi and Angelo Tringali from Slough Feg use.

So really, Rising Fury? There's bugger all fury to go around in this limp, over-professional album, and the band will hardly be doing much rising up the ranks of the metal underground any time soon.