Midnight Dreamer

Rhode Island rising force Demon Chrome's 2019 single "Midnight Dreamer" crashes the pier with five-plus minutes of unpretentious, grass-roots trad metal liable to tear off one's keister faster than a horde of slave ship tracking sharks gearing up for their next meal, for want of historically shameful imagery.

If you've gleaned my other pair of none-too-shoe-horned DC write-ups, rest assured the Providence-ials' middle task, ensconced between roughshod or amateurish, albeit sufficiently proficient, Chrome Demo(n) demo from 2018 and this past December's Burned By Love second, equally lionized Burned By Love (EP) affectation, rocks as starkly, albeit slightly less effervescently, as its sandwichin' brethren.

Succeeding ominously squeal-some feedback effects, an unmistakeable Blitzkrieg/"Am I Evil?" palm-muted mid-tempo guitar riff waylays itself, swift and belligerent-like, overtop front man Dylan K.'s despondently craggy, at times, heavy-rockish mid-range, which, fortuitously, eschews haywire, over-the-top falsettos so iconic to likes of quintessential Rob Halford or the downright athletic disposition of Raven's Gallagher brothers. Instead, we, the listeners, are (mis)treated to his ever-lugubrious flights of wan, laconic fancy, which, oddly, are possessed of their own timely magic as he never misses a note, or step, insofar as vocal prowess is concerned.

"Midnight Dreamer" entails a Demon Chrome outlier, if said power mage's high-strung, upper-ranged meandering is of any indication. The track's outright momentum, however, gets cranked at 02:55, whence a revved, palm-muted bridge paves the poltergeist floor for slickster's idea of what a masterful lead breakdown is. Namely, clouting six-string acrobatics which know no bounds, and thus, until deadly return to inceptively dark NWOBHM form. So far as contemporary comparisons go, picture a flogged and flawed, stringier Stereo Nasty, and not only cover-wise either.