THE NIGHTMARE STAGE is a 4-piece Metal act coming from New York – and so far this New York-based band has put out just one album, titled “Free Admission For The Damned”, including 9 tracks in total. Genre-wise, they have managed to cross a couple of sub-genres of Heavy Metal music on their debut album. The main frame of the band’s Metal is built around dark and sinister sounding Heavy Metal (even the band’s name obligates them to do such sort of stuff, ha!), which has also adopted some prog-ish and Power Metal-orientated ingredients in for a good measure. Vocalist Scott Oliva is however, the main luminary character in the line-up of THE NIGHTMARE STAGE, who gets the brightest and most powerful limelights targeted straight toward him on the (nightmare) stage due to an incredible use of vocalism. The fellow reminds me occasionally of Bruce Dickinson of MAIDEN, James Rivera of HELSTAR, Michael Kiske of HELLOWEEN and a couple of other Metal vocalists whose names just escaped from my lips (sorry about that). Also, Craig Besemer who has played both guitars and bass in for this record, has done a pretty amazing work on his own departments, I have to admit it. What actually – at least for me, worked a bit of sort of turn-off on this otherwise so enjoyable album, were some of the keyboard parts as they seemed to be all over the place – stealing a teeny-weeny too much my immediate attention, and just coming way too close to my skin – for the cost of other elements in the songs. If they just had dropped some of the keyboard parts off this record, I think they would have made a better impact for my picky taste anyway. Regardless what I mentioned in here about the keyboards’ a bit negative presence in some of the songs on the debut album of THE NIGHTMARE STAGE, overall this record left a relatively promising yet pleasing after-taste on my lips. There’s undoubtedly a decent amount of potential in THE NIGHTMARE STAGE, and I’d not be completely surprised if some label already snapped them due to quality of the songs on their debut album. May the Lady Fortune walk amongst with them for a while, too. www.myspace.com/thenightmarestage