Blessing in Disguise

Metal Church are on a streak! This is their third album, and it's of at least as much quality as their first two, if not even more! On this one they introduced a new vocalist, Mike Howe. He does a very good job, just as good as David Wayne on the first two albums. Howe has quite an astounding vocal range, he provides some high shrieks at several points in the album, and can also sing a few octaves lower (see Anthem to the Estranged, mostly) and do your average semi-high pitched thrash scream without sounding off at all. Also, the riffs are a bit more complex than on the first two albums. Here they’ve got riffs carrying like ten different notes, while on, say, the debut album, five is pretty much the maximum. This makes the songs sound more progressive, however the quality doesn’t suffer from that since the songs are well written and the riffs are quite damn vicious enough. The atmosphere on this album is also great (most notable the fourth and fifth track, but the other songs also got the atmosphere right!), which is because Metal Church know how to write good songs. A lot of bands couldn't, and lost it when they got too technical, melodic, even before the groove came and ate thrash in the 90's (Coroner's Mental Vortex and Metallica, for example, come to mind, not to mention Forbidden). This isn’t the case with Metal Church – they have got to be one of the most consistent thrash metal bands out there, who still put out some decent material nowadays. And of course their earlier albums are completely godly. This will prove it for you if you weren’t convinced after ‘Metal Church’ and ‘The Dark’.
One last thing worthy of mention is the amount of variety. ‘Metal Church’ and ‘The Dark’ had their share of variety, and this one does too. It varies between epic songs and total thrashers very well, while still keeping a sense of consistency. With such an album you just can’t go wrong.

Note that all the songs on here are absolutely great at least, though for the highlight I’d go with ‘The Spell Can’t Be Broken’. Holy shit, the middle section plus solo is one ownage combination in this song!
Other favourites of mine include Fake Healer, with the nice chorus and solo, also the ballad ‘Anthem To The Estranged’ and ‘Cannot Tell A Lie’ with the nice lyrics and once again great riffs.
Also, ‘Rest In Pieces’ has quite a monster middle section (Sinking - faster!!!), and ‘Cannot Tell A Lie’ has a great one as well (Raise those banners - raise those flags!!!). Wow.
‘Of Unsound Mind’ is more like a standard thrasher; it doesn’t kick you in the face as much as the highlight, the sixth track, and it doesn’t really have the atmosphere of the duo ‘Anthem to the Estranged’ and ‘Badlands’. Oh well, we’re not all perfect anyway. The song is still very nice!

Right, so the debut was great, the follow-up threw in some more variety and things got better, and they succeeded in making this one even better with some extremely original riffs and overall very well-written songs. As I said for the previous two albums as well, get this one way or another!