When I was first handed this album, my immediate thought was “oh dear, it’s some 80’s obsessed adman’s idea of capturing the teenage metal market.” An all female band from Stockholm, on first look they seem to have been moulded into an act designed to sell posters to impressionable hormonal youngsters from a bygone generation, with five latex miniskirt clad young ladies sporting such names as ‘Anni De Vil’, ‘Bitchie’, and ‘RockZilla’. The packaging was enough to make me think the pioneering work of the likes of Girlschool, Holy Moses and Arch Enemy had never been.
When the music started though, I was pleasantly surprised with the quality of the straight forward mid pace metal coming from the stereo. Opener ‘We Are The Undertakers’ had simple chugging guitars and rhythm section backing strong vocals, the riffs being reminiscent of classic Saxon. The influence of classic NWOBHM (New Wave Of British Heavy Metal for the uninitiated out there) continued to seep through in tracks like ‘Halloween’, simple cleanly sung lyrics being punctuated by a steady solo that breaks down into a surprisingly ‘Sabbathesque’ slow riff.
With ‘Bless the Beast’, speeding up the pace with stomping guitars, a harder edge was displayed, whilst the lyrics carried down tried and tested metal themes of demons and priests, a style continued in ‘Girls of Heavy Metal’, a hook laden story of the band playing a show, complete with roaring amps and bleeding ears.
Listening to the album as a whole, the influence of classic rock is heard throughout; title track ‘Metalwar’, with its exhortation to “bring your sword to the metalwar” could have been written for the band by Dio himself, and it’s in this sort of niche the band is most likely to find a more then willing market. With a host of festivals coming up, and a classic sound that seems to be seeing resurgence in Europe, so long as the clean and solid playing of the CD can be recreated live, Hysterica could well grow beyond their visual presence, and prove a successful act.
http://www.hysterica.se
http://www.myspace.com/hysterica
