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This isn’t to say a band has to be one-dimensional of course, a mix of different influences and styles can work wonders. But musically, everything about the band screams classic hard rock. On the one hand, they present themselves with a deliberately dark aesthetic, with plenty of morbid touches in their presentation and a biography that tells a tale of a band formed “in the halls of a local funeral parlor”. There’s also an odd contrast between certain aspects of the band. Harmonica, firework sounds, furious guitar solos that call Joe Satriani or Lynyrd Skynyrd to mind, Star-Spangled riffing, and of course a big chant of “Red! White! Blue!”, just to really hammer it home. “Red White and Blue”, while one of the more meaty tracks on the album, is everything you expect it to be from the title, the quintessential all-American rocker. It could just be the fact that most of the tracks on here set out to do the exact same thing, and though some like “Golgotha” and “Salvation” do it better than others, this just leaves the remaining songs out in the cold. It could be the vocals, which are energetic but sound out of place without much to back them up. It could be the production, which lacks a certain weight, plodding and tip-tapping when it should roar and stomp. Something’s missing from the mix, something doesn’t quite click. Rough and ready riffs, wailing vocals in the same vein as Blackie Lawless, gang-chants a-plenty in the choruses.īut a few songs in, and that formula is rapidly starting to go stale. This is hard rocking classic metal through and through, with a lot of what you’d expect from such a formula.
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The band is certainly very clear and unabashed about what they’re here to do. The problem is that’s more or less all it does. And Torchlight Parade’s self-titled debut certainly -does- rock. To say an album rocks is almost always a resounding and succinct form of praise.