LORD: Ascendence

Produced by Lord Tim

Released: 2007

As LORD currently tours around the east coast with Saxon (review of the Sydney show to follow), it's time to take a look at their album Ascendence. To those who were familiar with Dungeon, it shouldn't take more than half a brain to figure out that the Ascendence of the title is a resurrection from the ashes of that great Australian metal band. LORD is two-thirds of that band's final line-up and as can probably be expected, this is very much a transitional album, featuring a style, a sound and material that fans and followers of Dungeon would find pretty familiar.

The opening intro "Echoes of the Past" helps to lay that past to rest before "Reborn" rises up like the demon on the cover on a firestorm of loud, supercharged guitars. Right away then that typical Dunge... er, LORD sound is stamped all over this: the guitars are HUGE! As always, guitar freaks will be shitting their pants in anticipation of this album and with a couple of masterclass plank wielders in the shape of Chris Brooks and Mark Furtner helping Lord Tim out on a few tracks, you just know that there is going to be some spectacular six-string wrangling going on here.

Fortunately the songwriting is also firmly in place, and that means big, catchy songs with big, memorable singalong choruses. Indeed, LORD's formula here is the same that Dungeon used for all those years. At times, maybe almost too close a copy. For example, the main vocal melody lines from "Same Old Lines" sound, somewhat ironically given the song title, rather like that in "A Rise to Power". The comparisons are too many to list but in the end it doesn't really matter because LORD is really just a new beginning, as tracks like "Reborn" and "Legacy" point out.

"Rain" is the track where things start to get really interesting on Ascendence. Beginning with a nice bass intro this one opens fairly quietly with thunder rolls in the background before going into a nice mid-paced chug with some charming backing vocals from pop singer Tania Moran. Another thunderclap then leads into a solo trade-off between Lord Tim and Brooks that's worth the price of admission alone. Ditto for "Through the Fire" where they both seem to push each other to new limits of fret-burning. "Limb From Limb" is a fast, heavy and aggressive track that recalls the A Rise to Power track "Traumatised" but with a more believable effort on the shrieking vocals. The next track, "220" is merely an unashamed shredfest with Tim and Furtner apparently trying to melt each other's faces off. That gives way to the album's epic, "Legacy". Moran's vocals chime in again during the choruses here and it's a bit of a shame that the production doesn't really bring them out a bit more often.

No album these days is really complete without a bonus track, and on this it's a version of Pantera's "Shattered" with a slightly updated guitar mix from the one that appeared on 2006's The Art of Shredding tribute album. This tidies everything up very nicely with a good, faithful acknowledgement of a prime influence.

In the end, Ascendence delivers everything expected of it, certainly no less and probably not really much more. In that regard, LORD could be criticised for taking zero risks with this album. If there is that feeling of safeness about it though, it can be excused for the moment as the band lays to rest the last vestiges of its past while laying a pretty decent foundation for the future.

1. Echoes of the Past
2. Reborn
3. Going Down
4. Same Old Lines
5. Rain
6. My Own Way
7. Through the Fire
8. The Calm
9. Limb From Limb
10. 220
11. Legacy
12. Shattered

Rating: 86%