Heavy Nights

Hardware is a really obscure heavy metal band from The Netherlands. Their Heavy Nights album is their only known album. It is not a groundbreaking album at all. It’s a standard sounding heavy metal album from the 1980s. It has its good moments and bad moments. It is not a perfect album at all.

Halley’s Arrival sounds like an Iron Maiden-inspired song, but then there’s really awful static noise going on. The first 35 seconds are good, but then it sounds really bad after that. It is too bad since the singer sounds pretty good and has a unique voice. There’s some really great Maiden-inspired riffs in this song. It is not the best song on the album, though.

Hard and Loud is the best song on this album. It kind of sounds like a heavier AC/DC song. It is a mid-paced song with some good guitar riffs. It has a really catchy chorus. Stage Warrior is a slower song, but then it starts to sound like a mid-paced song. There’s some really excellent drumming. It has a really long guitar solo that sounds impressive. One of the guitarists really knows how to shred and he showcases his skills here. This is the 2nd best song on the record. There’s hardly any static noise on Hard and Loud and Stage Warrior.

Foreign Skies is a ballad-like song that suffers from that static noise like on Halley’s Arrival. It happens to be the longest song on the album, too. The first 50 seconds has a clean guitar playing and then there’s some random synthesizer sounds that play out of nowhere. This song is really bad. It drags on with that annoying static noise, but it has decent singing on it.

Coming Out is the only song where you can hear the bass well, but the bass is not the highlight of the song. Coming Out kind of reminds me of Judas Priest as it has Judas Priest- inspired guitar riffs. It features some good vocal harmonies by the singer in this song. The singer sings “nothing can wrong” in the first and then that static noise returns at 0:52. Then Queen of Visions sounds like a mix of Judas Priest and Iron Maiden. It is under 4 minutes and it’s decent. This song has two guitar solos in it. There’s really nothing special about this song.

That static noise is the worst part about this album. This album could have been longer and with more songs. Six songs clocking in at 30 minutes and 31 seconds is decent. The bass could have been turned up louder, but it sadly wasn’t. The guitars, vocals and drums drown out the bass.