I remember… I remember this band! Somewhere I have their debut album. I remember it was some sort of Black / Thrash Metal assault. And that was more than 20 years ago. So for this band from Finland, formed in 1996, this is just their second album. Some line-up changes have happened over the years. The vocalist is new, as I remember him sounding different. So what we have here is a more Thrash Metal album with a few old school Black Metal touches. The main sound is not that far away from what bands like EXODUS, TESTAMENT and even VENOM are doing nowadays. It is well produced and very well executed, yet I cannot find something that interesting or exciting that makes this memorable. I think that the vocalist is part of the problem as most of the time he sounds the same, and reminds me of that Rob Dukes guy, which is not that good in my book. They sound like they decided to create a “safe” Thrash Metal album that will probably work very good in a live situation for moshing and thrashing, but does not have that long lasting impression. And it is not that Thrash Metal is limited nowadays (well, it is a little bit), but bands like NOCTURNAL, CRISIX, BÜTCHER and HOLYCIDE have proven that they can still make very unoriginal music yet keeping it interesting. In fact the song ‘Cabin In The Woods’ proves they can do great songs without any ounce of identity. All the other songs have a similar way of performance, which is not bad, yet the songs tend to sound very similar. For a band with such a long career I was expecting a bit more, but fans of the style will surely find something here. www.facebook.com/walhallametal, www.facebook.com/greatdanerecords