Future Knights

Wyzard – Knights of Metal

Let me just start by saying this is probably one of the weaker offerings I’ve obtained/heard lately (along with Y Diawled’s Noson y Blaidd, Torn Flesh, and a couple others I can’t think of right now – probably better to for get them anyway?). Starting with the name – I’m getting damn tired of purposely mis-spelled band names. What’s the point? I’m not sure. This isn’t something confined to just metal bands though – 60’s North American garage bands were doing it a lot, then you get your Led Zeppelins etc, etc, and suddenly it became acceptable to deliberately mis-spell words. I don’t care for it – especially when one in three new bands you come across has one of these names – it just gets a little tacky, or forced. Sometimes it’s cool – like Witchfynde – that’s a cool name, and stuff like Attaxe is cool too, but as a double-degree graduate, I get my panties in a knot at this dumbing down of the English language – seems a bit moronic at times – don’t get me started on text message ‘speak’ either. Anyway, lame name here – I could just be completely over the mis-spelling thing, or I don’t know – you make the call.

Anyway, generally the EP has some good attempts at your 80’s power metal sound - perhaps in the vein of Helstar, but it’s all-round pretty rudimentary – seeming a bit weak, and not well thought out. Sounds more like an early demo in the quality of the songs, while not necessarily being horrible – just a little weak. One of the main problems is the vocals. In much of the EP, say for example the track ‘Renegade’ Vocals cross between monotonous (barely) changes of low pitch (“Renegaaaaaade”) and weakly, often seemingly forceless shrieks. Sorry to say, but the singer isn’t that great. This is an example of what I mentioned about ‘rudimentary’ and so on earlier. Perhaps another year of re-working the song, and working on the vocals in this track, and others – and this one could’ve been a lot stronger. More vocal twinning, or actual backups from another guitarist would have been good touches – adding more depth and dynamic variety – to especially ‘Renegade’ but to a lesser extent the other tracks too. Over reliance on spacing out and reverb on the vocals is always a cop out by a weak vocalist. I know, I know – it’s 80’s power to do that, but here it often serves to seemingly deliberately mask the weaker moments of Gilbert Grant Guzman.

Repetitiveness is another problem on the EP. There are some okay riff sections – dark, moody, and evoking fantasy imagery, but the riffs and vocals are repeated too much, and drowned in mediocre, lazy vocal tones. The repetitive structure of “Crystal City” is made worse by the annoying, voice breaking screams on vocals – just a horrible effort that I’m sure they could’ve got better takes of. Guzman’s voice actually cracks in these takes – I mean, that does happen from time to time, but you usually just do another take. It would seem the engineer was asleep, probably induced into slumber by the monotony of guitar/vocal passages frequent in this album. Anyway, somehow he missed these weak vocal moments, and they ended up here. The lame lyrics in ‘Crystal City’ are bad enough – without being repeated umpteen times and coupled with these weak shrieks on vocals.


On the plus side, Guitars at decent enough tone, galloping around the low, and strong sounding bass of John Anthony Alvarado, particularly in the track ‘Future Nights’. However – this track is again let down by significant monotony, repetitiveness, and some pretty weak vocal work. A pretty killer screaming guitar lead over the aforementioned bass is enjoyable, but the drums sound like the skins are made of cheap plastic, having about as much balls and thunder as a kids set from Wall Mart. Other pluses on this one include a bunch of the often simplistic, but good guitar riffery, but this is let down by it’s frequent over-use – kinda gets a bit repetitive. Your biggest plus in the album art – a great classic fantasy/metal art LP cover which is a classicly 80’s as any. Awesome touch there. It does really suit the sound these guys have too.

All round – this one is not a great. The songs have promise – but are in need of reworking, and definitely would better from more production touches – chorus vocals, samples, and some dynamism in mixing – anything to break it out of the monotonous slumber it often falls into. Maybe you could give it a listen, and see for yourself – you could well disagree – but in any case – there’s no denying the over-repetition of vocals, lame high pitch shrieks, and general rudimentary, unpolished feel you get from this outing. If you’re after some good rare 80’s power – better to check out Glacier, or Oliver Magnum. This one aint winning any contests, but isn’t really ‘bad’ per se. A few vocal lessons, and back to the drawing board for a year or so, before rerecording, and this one could well be a winner. Find out for yourself?

-DeathRiderDoom