When the Door Is Closed

When the Danish thrash metal geniuses, Artillery, broke up the first time after their first three great albums, the band's guitar masters, the Stutzer brothers formed Missing Link. Actually I think even Artillery's drummer is in the band, so you might think this was almost the same thing. Unfortunately, that is not quite the case.

Missing Link's music is not really in the same style as Artillery, the riffs are quite distinctly different, as the music is generally slower and only borderline thrash at all. The vocalist is definitely a melodic heavy metal one, and pretty okay, although I don't particularly like his voice either.

The production is quite tinny, some of Artillery's albums already had questionable production in some people's opinion, although personally I find that the 'rusty chainsaw' guitar sound on Fear of Tomorrow just awesome. On this album, however, the production is slightly poor, the band members probably did not have much of a budget at this point since the record is self released. Still, if the songs are good, slightly unimpressive production values can be overlooked.

However, that is a bit of a problem here: the songs simply are not up to the standard found on the Artillery records. Partly, a listener might come to this conclusion because of the different style of music found here, but I have tried several times to listen to the product objectively, and there is nothing that memorable found here.

I would say this is not as good as even the worst Artillery album (My Blood, IMO), so only real Stutzer freaks might want this if they find it anywhere. Most listeners will be content with Artillery's discography. Still, it's not an awful album by any means, there are good moments and good guitar playing, just not as striking as the band members' previous efforts elsewhere.