Artist: The Horde (US)
Title: Thy Blackened Reign
Type: Album
Label: Stormspell Records

US band The Horde are tagged as playing thrash inspired metal, gaining a helping hand from traditional metal melodies. From the opener ‘Death Foretold’ there is actually quite a lot of melodic death metal riffing going on, it’s mixed rather well and wets your appetite for further moments of metal madness. Then moving onto tracks like ‘Thy Blackened Reign’ whereby you have thrash in abundance, the speed instantly increases and adds some elements of crossover to the sound. The Horde appear to have not yet decided upon their musical tag, there are a lot of cross genre influences all mixed into one track or another. Galloping guitars are prominent (like the galloping horsemen on the album cover) and are featured in most songs. The mix is rather tasty, but there is a lack of sustain in the sound, each note ends rather sharply making it a little too clinical. ‘Odin’s Blood’ injects life and venom as the riffs continue to flow and fists are beginning to raise high in the air.

Delving deeper into this album becomes more rewarding, by the time ‘Into War We Ride’ plays, The Horde finally manage to master their thrash/melodic death art. This style is rather common and oversaturated in Europe, thus I do struggle with complacency, it’s just not that different when the music is clearly trying so hard to be so. Thus, sounding like 3 Inches of Blood, there is a clear love for traditional metal; it’s just hidden amongst their other influences. ‘Super Tusk’ is the sound of this raw talent coming to fruition, their mix of influences are on the whole rather entertaining but the stark reality is that it’s nothing that gives a unique selling point to their peers, my biggest impression is actually the epic majesty of the album artwork. This is a musically solid effort, but The Horde will have to work hard to rise above the chasing pack in this music minefield.

http://www.myspace.com/hordemetal

Paul Maddison

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