No Smoke Without Fire

While plenty of bands would start to get infected by trends occurring in the 90’s, Anthem were one of those immune to such things. No Smoke Without Fire is the sixth album of these guys and sounds like it easily could have been put out a few years earlier.

While Anthem's progression over the years wouldn't always make perfect sense (the explosive Hunting Time came out after the band's most melodic record, for instance), Anthem weren't afraid to show their Western influences and No Smoke Without Fire might be their most Westernized effort. ‘’Voice of Thunderstorm’’ sounds like Anthem’s tribute to ‘’Freewheel Burning’’ and destroys all in sigh with its gunfire riffing, non-stop guitar solos and intense shrieks – you know the deal. Yes, you’ve heard this kind of track before, but does it really matter since it gets pulled off with such conviction? I don’t think so.

It’s not all crazy speed metal you’ll find here, but in Anthem’s case that’s hardly an issue. ‘’Power & Blood’’ is pure fun karaoke metal (don’t Google this term as I just made it up) that was first designed by Accept and features Yukio Morikawa at his proudest and loudest. If his vocal lines don’t get you in the mood to shout along, you might as well lock yourself into your basement and stare outside of your window into the void of nothingness forever. ‘’Hungry Soul’’ features a serious punch of a main riff and once those soaring guitar leads pop up, you know you’re in for the real deal. While No Smoke Without Fire rocks from the beginning till the very end, its peak gets reached early on, though. ‘’Blinded Pain’’ is easily the best song here - with a serious passionate chorus it’s of larger-than-life-quality and Yukio Morikawa steals the spotlight by belting his heart out, making me believe it could cause a thousand Japs to shed a tear while throwing the horns with pride at the same time.

Unfortunately this would be Hiroya Fukuda's swansong and I wish he had never left. Clearly inspired by K.K. Downing and Glenn Tipton, Hiroya Fukuda's guitar playing is classy and rather melodic here; sounding more restrained than on most of the band's past albums and although this would only be a problem if the quality of his compositions would suffer from it, that’s certainly not the case here. With the exception of the aforementioned ''Power & Blood'' each track features a handful of riffs that keep you satisfied until the album is over.

So yes, for me this is Anthem’s last actual good album (none of their stuff that I’ve heard is downright bad, but like I said, without Hiroya Fukuda, Anthem is just not my kind of Anthem) and while No Smoke Without Fire is not very original by any means, it's definitely worthy.