 |
 |
 |
› Eden’s Curse – Eden’s Curse
AFM Records – Out Now
I asked many people about this band and most asked the same question… Who? Among those unfortunate people was myself, I had never heard of the band, this made it my mission to look into them deeper. I found that I knew the band well, the members that is, from various other bands they had been in. We will go into that a little later. For now I had a start, I read up on the guys, listening to samples on their MySpace and their Website. I liked what I heard, I wasn’t blown away by them, but they rocked hard, so I was willing to pursue my interest further. Mike Exley from AFM offered me the album for review and an interview with the guys. Upon receiving the album, I put aside a couple of hours, locked my door, turned off the phone and immersed my self in a good session of musical excellence.
What the samples didn’t give me was the true Eden’s Curse effect. The band had nailed the album! The tempo was one of the biggest reasons for this; the album hits hard, from the great gloomy opener to the Steelheart cover at the end it seduces you into it and doesn’t let you go.
We start and have the obligatory monologue at the beginning, leading into an acoustic intro that is just awesome, followed by the kick into the real rock of the album, three tracks of pure headbanging rock. This could easily become repetitive for any band, but not EC, they give us a great breaker that is the ever underused soft rock technique, “The Voice Inside” Is a completely different style, well written lyrics with a great musical styling, incorporating some fantastic blues guitar played expertly by “new comer” Thorsten Koehne. Power ballad class!
Now track six hits back with a heavy kick into “After The Love Is Gone” To take us away from the romantic feel of “The Voice Inside” Reminding us that this album is hard rock and heavy metal, old school style. Moving from hard track to harder track, nice and fast paced music immediately draws you back into the fold and reminiscent of the best days of rock with something new thrown in.
This album has some songs that where bon to be heard live, but for now the album is well enough to keep me going. Stand out fast track for me is “Don’t Bring Me Down” this I feel is the height of speed from the album, after this we move to “Heaven Touch Me” Much heavier but also defiantly slower paced. From this we get a two track epic. “The Bruce” Leading into “Fallen King” This is a great end to the album, anything after this is bonus track, all equally worthy, but this was always meant as the true end of the album, and what an end. The power of an epic is often lost early in the album or mid way through. Epics aren’t about length, but style. This track has more style that a seventies exploitation movie pimp in platforms and a purple velvet suit with a wide gold rimmed hat with a high pink feather sticking from the leopard print hat ribbon! O…k…a…y… then… Maybe I’ll just say it’s just got a lot of style!
Follow this with a cover as homage to the nineties! The track is “We All Die Young” originally by Steelheart. Eden had covered this in a previous band. It was originally planned as a Japanese bonus track but I guess the band felt it worked well enough for the final cut of the album. It’s a superb cover and really has that powerful vocal that delivers a fantastic second ending to a well pace album. The track has a really different feel to the rest of the album, but it works so well and really helps lead into whatever bonus tracks you get (varies dependant on country).
The band has obvious influences from both NWOBHM and AOR but they also have their own feel, Mike Eden’s vocal mixed with Paul Logue’s bass and leadership, amazing song writing, virtuoso class guitars from Koehne the band had an already impressive advantage, add to the stew Ferdy Doernberg on the keys and Pete Newdeck on the drums you get a winning formula, that doesn’t fail to deliver an awesome rocking album!
Overall this album walks into an 8.5/10 without breaking a sweat!
Baz
|
|
|