Haven’t listened to much Overkill before, and the stuff I have heard has generally had really bad thrash vocals. This album fares a lot better on that front, with a more melodic delivery on top of a large pile of strong riffage. The backing vocals are a bit cringey, and the production kind of stinks; but if you get past those things this is a legitimately good album, like a B-list band punching above their weight class. Unfortunately it’s up against
Headless Cross, which is a great album without any of those caveats. Sorry,
@Whooten, but
@Forostar ’s nominee has more mojo.
Winner: Black Sabbath
Motörhead is not a band I’ve spent much time listening to. Lemmy is an acquired taste, and the few songs of theirs I’d heard weren’t that inspiring — so I was pleasantly surprised by
1916, which was a consistently enjoyable set of punchy hard rock songs that never bored me. The title track was a bit cheesy, but I still enjoyed every song on the album. Meanwhile, this Opeth album has a lot of strong musical passages, but also a lot of really horrible glass gargling vocals that make Lemmy sound like an opera singer by comparison. Sorry,
@Forostar, but I have to go with
@Magnus ’s nominee this time.
Winner: Motörhead
This Hell Fire album has overly fat bass and a bit of a low rent feel, but it’s also a solid slab of energetic metal with some obvious Maiden influence, and every song held my interest. Meanwhile, the Iced Earth album has a lot of neat guitar bits peppered throughout, but the singer kind of blows and the songwriting is unmemorable to me. Sorry,
@LooseCannon, but I have to go with
@Whooten ‘s choice here.
Winner: Hell Fire
And here’s yet another Primordial album, with pretty much the same pros and cons as all the other Primordial albums in the GMAC. The band can build a nice atmosphere, and their thick guitar harmonies and dancing arpeggios are appealing, but the singing is uneven and the songs often get stuck in a rut. This album does a bit better job of mixing up the song structures, but it also devolves into blast beats more often, and it doesn’t really have any standout songs in my opinion. The Symphony X album, while a bit cheesy in places, is also chock full of proggy neoclassical goodness, which is a personal soft spot for me. Sorry,
@Perun, but
@Lampwick 43 ’s nominee takes this one pretty easily.
Winner: Symphony X
).
