Vertical Horizon

This batch’s oeuvre I’ve been having problems coming to terms with… their irregular flippant exploits largely circled around the progressive power/speed metal idea, with thrash trudging along as a side-dish mostly, having a bigger say on the debut, before being swiftly demoted to a second-fiddle status on the sophomore. The guys’ penchant for interpreting non-metal hits (ABBA, Tina Turner, etc.) is just another idiosyncrasy in their strange repertoire, also bearing in mind the vocalist’s not very passionate, anti-adventurous mid-ranged clean baritone; which strikes a relative low on the album reviewed here.

This is a more conventional old school power/speed metal panorama, with thrash showing its head courageously on the militant headbanger “Cowboy”, but that’s pretty much it as the band find this softer string in their soul before long with the carefree hit “Beat My Brain”, and stay on this wavelength for close to an hour, shooting quasi-progressive pleasantries (“Freedom”), groove-polluted tributes to the departed 90’s (“Penincula”) and goofy punky vaudevilles (“France”), keeping the element of surprise high but generating little excitement in the process, as one can easily do without radio-friendly crowd-pleasers like “Aeromake-Up” and the deliberately cheesy “Don't Be Afraid”. The Manowar cover of “Carry on” from “Fighting the World” has been played around with, turned into an uplifting crossover speedster, but do not line up for the remainder, please, as such energy is alien to it… well, maybe “Maybe” will make you jump around some more with its more overt speed metal-ish flair, but by no means worry about your neck, or about any other body organ of yours as right after the album starts hobbling assuredly towards a rousingly messy finale.

Easily the weakest entry into the band’s short discography, this album did very little to convince that the band had a place under the new millennium metal sun, provided that most of the veterans from their homeland (Master, Aria, Koma, Valkyria, Legion, etc.) were kicking with vitality to spare, or thereabouts. The aggressive complexity from the older repertoire has been lost to a large extent, the guys failing to dexterously epitomize new tools of the trade in order to keep their delivery afloat. Guess the musicians were already thinking about their next project, Factor Straha, a melo-death metal formation which became operational very shortly after the album here got released; and actually managed to produce more music, five full-lengths to be exact, before folding in 2013, following two irreparable, tragic losses: the deaths of the drummer Stanislav Voznesensky and the bass player and vocalist Dmitry Skopin, two of the Trizna founders as well…

the “Forgotten Tapes” collection released posthumously in 2015 contains some potent material from their early days (before 1995), the debut included. Nothing vertical or horizontal there, just tolerable irregularity and covert sniffs of eccentricity, a nostalgic reminder of much better days.