Midnight Rendezvous

Tokyo Blade began on a really high note; the type of note King Diamond can reach after suffering a twisted testicle. Their self-titled debut was a piquant cocktail of sleazy barnstorming and sagely epics, like if Angel Witch wrote Wheels of Steel fan-fiction. Sadly, it was trammeled by a few throw-away filler songs, and more importantly, an astoundingly bad production. This left the album looking pretty anemic when it really shouldn't have, so Midnight Rendezvous was made to ensure their debut album had a six-pack and a granite chin by the time it left British shorelines.

Sporting a streamlined, hard-hitting tracklist and a less-horrific production, Midnight Rendezvous is Tokyo Blade's flagship - the definitive experience, and for my money, one of the most "complete" NWOBHM albums ever released. An effective coalition between catchy hair metal and crazed speed metal, 'Highway Passion' and 'Killer City' are two tracks with a bloodlust tempered by accessible, sapid riffing; it's precisely the type of angsty melodies and fiery solos that would move the pens of countless US and Teutonic thrashers raised on a diet of hot-blooded NWOBHM.

'If Heaven Is Hell' is a towering goliath of unrelenting guitar harmonies, punctuated by an unforgettable acoustic bridge that follows pentatonic scales for that trademark Asiatic spice. Meanwhile, 'Meanstreak' is a whole other beast, screaming into battle with scalpel-sharp rock 'n' roll riffs and dazzling solos. No pretense, no affectedness, just British speed metal pluck at its finest; in many ways similar to the bloodthirsty cuts from Killers like 'Purgatory' and 'Twilight Zone'.

The production still isn't fantastic, but bass sounds markedly crisper and there's a little less treble bias this time. That is to say, it doesn't sound like an angle grinder sawing through sheets of tinfoil. This makes their commercial-focused title track sound pretty passable in the grand scheme of things, and considerably more self-assured and composed than most tracks from, say, Saxon's Power and the Glory. But as you no doubt know, more of Tokyo Blade's time and money will be spent on production and hand sanitizer after touching Def Leppard's coattails, allowing songwriting complexity to fall behind more and more as the decades wore on.