“Lend Me Your Wings” is the bombastic debut of Velvet Seal, a very good Gothic metal band from Hungary. This album features 9 tracks providing 35 minutes of top notch Gothic metal that will definitely help this band get noticed and win them a great deal of fans.
Velvet Seal’s sound is very well defined and perfectly executed, having clear influences of After Forever (riffs in “Torn Within”), as well as other established metal bands in the genre.
Luckily Hot Buttered Anal sent this album in the same package as their first album so we avoided repeating the embarrassment of their mailing label (read the review of “Please Kill Me” for the full story).
“Lies” artwork seems more conservative than the bands first album, but it still features interesting song names like: “We’re Not Retarded, Choke the Bitch and Duct Tape and Sausages. So we knew we were in for another journey thru this band’s demented collective brain.
When we were first contacted by this band we were skeptical about their music since their name is pretty bizarre, but since we are pretty open minded and we link to review anything that is thrown at us, we sent out our mailing address to receive Hot Buttered Anal’s promo pack.
The first moment of awkwardness came in the form of the 60 year old lady working at our PO BOX office handing up a package with a colorful Hot Buttered Anal mailing label on it, she is used to handing out packages with pentagrams and similar stuff on them, but never with a clearly legible name like this, anyways things have not been the same since, but enough with this story.
When I first listened to this CD of this American band I was blown away, it sounded like any other big name, and big quality European Power Metal band. I had to go back and re-read that it was actually an American band. To make things worse, this band is still un-signed! I’m amazed by this fact. There are tons of other bands that are signed that have less than half the quality that Armory has.
Armory has been around since 2001 and has only released one demo in 2004, which was latter re-recorded to make the debut album “The Dawn Of Enlightenment”. So this means it took all these years for the band to polish their first opus and by all means they achieved a very solid and impressive first album.
Born Again - the Crucial Blast Records debut from France’s OVERMARS - will see US release September 22nd, 2009.
Instrumental Quartet Readies Fourth Full-Length Album; First Release On Southern Lord
This August we will be updating constantly with the next 3 days of our report of Wave Gotik Treffen 2009 as well as our reports of Hellfest 2009 and With Full Force 2009. We also have plenty of interviews (as you can see) and many more reviews. This summer has been very hectic both in traveling and in music releases and we will bring you coverage of the most important ones, as well as other albums that came upon our path. And we WILL get all the albums we have backed up done in the next few weeks so please be sure to come back and check to see your reviews featured here if you sent something to be reviewed by us.
Please add our RSS feed so you can get all the news and new content of the site instantly in your RSS reader. Also we have started our own YouTube video channel here, so you can see first hand some of our videos of WGT 2009 and all the other festivals and concerts we have attended this summer. Also remember that if you have something that you want reviewed by us, please contact us.
Table of contents for the Summer 2009 issue:
Wave-Gotik-Treffen 2009 Festival report (1st day is posted, and next 3 days to come in the next few days)
Interview with Cynic
Interview with Fairyland
Interview with Jungle Rot
Interview with Stream Of Passion
Interview with Sons Of Seasons
Interview With Eternal Tears Of Sorrow
Interview With Ashes You Leave
Interview With Delain
Interview with IQ
Interview with Trail Of Tears
Interview With Horde Of Hel
Interview With Ruins
Interview With Dodsferd
Hacride – Lazarus (2009)
The Legion – A Bliss To Suffer (2009)
Viveynne – Becoming Jane Doe (2009)
Idols Are Dead – Mean (2008)
Hypno5e - Des Deux L'une Est L'autre (2007)
Trail Of Tears – Blood Stained Endurance (2009)
Týr – By The Light Of The Northern Star (2009)
Glittertind – Landkjenning (2009)
Stream of Passion – The Flame Within (2009)
Alestorm – Black Sails At Midnight (2009)
IQ – Frequency (2009)
Magnum – Into The Valley Of The Moonking (2009)
Dakrya – Monumento (2008)
Grnd_0 – Destroyer / Creator (2008)
Fomento – Either Caesars Or Nothing (2008)
Ashes You Leave - Songs Of The Lost (2009)
Amoprhis - Silver Bride (2009)
Amorphis - Skyforger (2009)
Anneke Van Giersbergen (with Agua de Annique)...Pure Air (2009)
Thanks for everybody's help in making this issue possible, and expect more and better things for next month's edition!.