AIRBOURNE: No Guts. No Glory.

Produced by Johnny K

Released: March 8

AC/DC soundalike bands are a dime a dozen and I've lost count of the number of CDs by such bands that have littered my desk over the years. Few if any have ever had much appeal beyond novelty value, particularly if -- as it usually the case -- their only notable aspect is that they sound like AC/DC. Airbourne is different. There are few bands in recent memory who have copied another band as well as these guys do and yet made it work so well, because as much as they do sound like their idols, they have a vibrant, youthful energy coupled with an aggression in their playing that AC/DC has lacked since Bon Scott was alive.

Airbourne has nailed the classic AC/DC sound right down to Malcolm Young's guitar tone, but unlike bands like Rhino Bucket and Krokus who also plundered the Youngs' riff arsenal mercilessly, these Aussie lads also know how to write a bunch of catchy songs that manage to stay in your head once the album is over. They may not yet be able to quite fill an entire album with them, but they certainly have some good ones. The opening four tracks of No Guts. No Glory. are prime slices of mid-70s Aussie hard rock, buffed, polished, re-booted and re-energised into early 21st Century mode. It's fist-pumpin', headbangin', chorus-shoutin', heavy rockin' goodness from the first moment and continues rocking until well into the playlist with gutsy, earthy blue-collar rock n' roll that is at least as good and often even better than anything AC/DC has done in almost two decades. Joel O'Keefe's sneering wail has enough of the sound and power of his heroes to be authentic but retains a character of its own, although as the album ploughs on, he does begin to sound more and more like Brian Johnson.

Where the album falls down is in its length. At 47 minutes, No Guts. No Glory. is way too long for an album of heavy-as-shit rock n roll and after about track eight, the songs really start to take on a sameness that makes it drag out. "Chewin' the Fat" and "Get Busy Livin'" sound remarkably alike, with a build to the chorus that got me thinking of "What Do You Do For Money, Honey?", and "Armed and Dangerous" was almost the same, with "Shoot to Thrill" chucked in to boot. The raucous drinking anthem "Back on the Bottle" lifts it again in time to finish though, unless you decide on the Special Edition, which wears out the welcome even more by including another five tracks that simply aren't as good: "Kickin' it Old School" is a total waste of two and a half minutes. Still, this is the best album of pure high voltage rock n' roll since the last Airbourne album, and that includes Black Ice.

No Guts. No Glory. No frills. Just rock. Crank it!

1. Born to Kill
2. No Way but the Hard Way
3. Blonde, Bad and Beautiful
4. Raise the Flag
5. Bottom of the Well
6. White Line Fever
7. It Ain't Over 'till It's Over
8. Steel Town
9. Chewin' the Fat
10. Get Busy Livin'
11. Armed and Dangerous
12. Overdrive
13. Back on the Bottle

Special Edition tracks:

1. Loaded Gun
2. My Dynamite Will Blow You Sky High (and Get Ya Moanin' After Midnight)
3. Rattle Your Bones
4. Kickin' it Old School
5. Devil Child

Rating: 80%

ARMORED SAINT: La Raza

Produced by Joey Vera
Released: Today

If you caught their shows last year or you've heard any of their albums, you'd already know that Armored Saint is one of the most under-rated bands in metal history, and here's proof. They may have only made three albums in the last 19 years, but they aren't the least bit rusty. Every time these five dudes get together, they make it sound like they've never been apart, and despite Joey Vera's assertion that he really wasn't interested in trying to take up where Revelation left off in 2000, it's clear almost immediately that La Raza is an Armored Saint album.

"Loose Cannon" comes in on a slow build from acoustics then breaks out into their trademark style of rocking heavy metal. It's a solid beginning, but Armored Saint is just warming up, unleashing a classic twin guitar harmony in the intro to "Head On" before heading into a chunky riff and then a big catchy groove. "Left Hook from Right Field" and "Get Off the Fence" are as equally littered with hooks and rock-style grooves, with Jeff Duncan and Phil Sandoval busting out some guitar pyrotechnics in the latter.

Displaying the diversity they've long been known for, the title track opens with a distinctive Latin rock vibe recalling Gonzo's percussive work on "Tribal Dance". "La Raza" is a heavy, bluesy jam, easily the stand out of the album and one of the band's best tracks ever, which is saying a lot. Other songs work in the ethnic and blues-flavoured influences also while remaining solidly in heavy metal territory. The closer even throws in a funky edge to heightened the almost danceability factor of the whole album.

La Raza is an extremely catchy album, with John Bush, having penned some of his best lyrics, in fine voice as always. Like Overkill, Armored Saint rarely if ever disappoint, and as there doesn't appear to be any plans for the band to play live beyond a couple of dates in LA, La Raza may be your final chance to enjoy one of the best metal bands of all.

1. Loose Cannon
2. Head On
3. Left Hook from Right Field
4. Get Off the Fence
5. Chill
6. La Raza
7. Black Feet
8. Little Monkey
9. Blues
10. Bandit Country

Rating: 90%

UNLEASHED: As Yggdrasil Trembles

Produced by Frederik Folkare

Released: Today

These days, the definition of death metal seems to change every few months as elements are added, subtracted, ramped up or diluted. Even for an experienced chronicler it gets difficult to delineate where death metal ends and something else begins: is it hardcore, deathcore, metalcore, death metal hardcore, pretentious jazz-metal noodling bullshit with death vox?

Sweden's old-schoolers Unleashed shine like a beacon in the murk of cross-genre pollution, cutting through the smog like a scythe. Because Unleashed plays death metal the old way, and they've never done anything else. These guys have been doing this so well for so long, you get the feeling they could knock their tunes together as they sleep. But music as simple and unadorned as this is the hardest to create, because it takes enormous discipline to keep to the same path with so many diversions. No band exists in a vaccuum, and it's not as if the guys in Unleashed haven't played in other bands that are different, but when they get together in this formation they just do Unleashed, as if there's no other band in existence.

So it is then that As Yggdrasil Trembles continues the proud tradition of no-frills, groove-laden death metal. As always, they are almost subtle as far as death metal goes: no over-the-top speed or expansive technical parts, almost restrained drumming that does what it needs to and little else, listenable vocals. And, as always, they have made a consistently strong album of rousing, catchy metal songs, the kind that call to mind raging fires surrounded by bearded men swinging huge jugs of mead as they toast some ancient victory or prepare to obliterate some weaker foe. Whenever Johnny Hedlund isn't singing directly about Norse mythology -- as he does in "Chief Einherjar", the title track, and others -- he's singing about combat: "Return Fire", "This Time We Fight", and the band constantly drives the music as if caught in the midst of battle.

But what am I going on and on for? If you're familiar with Unleashed, you'll know what to expect from As Yggdrasil Trembles. If you're not, then chuck it on and hear what death metal sounds like without all the bullshit. Either way, you can't go wrong.

1. Courage Today, Victory Tomorrow!
2. So it Begins
3. As Yggdrasil Trembles
4. Wir Kapitulieren Neimals
5. This Time We Fight
6. Master of the Ancient Art
7. Chief Einherjar
8. Return Fire
9. Far Beyond Hell
10. Dead to Me
11. Yahweh and the Chosen Ones
12. Cannibalistic Epidemic Continues

Rating: 85%

WHY AC/DC MATTERS

by Anthony Bozza

As a life-long AC/DC fan, former Rolling Stone journalist Anthony Bozza ponders why it took until the mega-selling Black Ice album for the band to begin to get some of the real critical success he thinks they've long deserved. His argument is a strong one, and in this book he dissects AC/DC's music into its constituent parts as if examining the workings of a car or the valves of the human heart. By doing this, and doing it with humour and an engaging spark to his writing, Bozza is somehow able to stretch what would ordinarily be a feature article into a 160-page book that even the doubters his argument is aimed at would enjoy.

Why AC/DC Matters is a good read, carefully examining the way a band has been able to use little more than five open chords to write close to 200 songs and sell more albums than everyone except The Beatles. Bozza's analysis is meticulous as he considers Malcolm Young's style of play and speaks with college professors about the vocal abilities of Brian Johnson and Bon Scott. It's a strange intellectualisation of a band that -- rightly or wrongly -- is widely considered by critics as an antithesis of intellectualism. Yet herein lies Bozza's point: for a band to have made such simple music so successful for so long actually requires real genius.

While he does make this point, and few readers could come away from it disagreeing with him, it's hard to see exactly who this book is aimed at. As a biography it's irrelevant in the wake of Murray Engleheart's colossal Maximum Rock n Roll and it really doesn't offer anything new to either fans or non-fans. AC/DC, he writes, have made the same music for almost 40 years. This is a fact everyone knows. Their music is simple, but lots of people like it. Everyone knows this too. And as a lot of people also know, outside the metal and guitar mags, music critics have never much liked them. Nothing Bozza writes about AC/DC is anything I didn't already know; it's almost as if he wrote this just to please himself and his agent sold it on knowing that people would buy it because it's about the second-highest selling band in history. Even so, unlike I did with Stephen Davis' Guns N' Roses debacle, I didn't feel gyped by Why AC/DC Matters. It might be ultimately rather pointless, but it is good fun.

FOZZY: Chasing the Grail

Produced by Rich Ward except *by Mike Martin

Released: January 20

Looking back, I reckon I was a bit hard on Fozzy's previous album, as it was much better than I gave it credit for. Even so, five years on and Chasing the Grail completely buries it in every way. This is without doubt the band's most complete and accomplished work to date, a grand combination of Chris Jericho and Rich Ward's vast influences and inspirations from the metal world into a coherent whole. It isn't perfect as "Broken Soul" and a couple of songs in the middle demonstrate, but trying to find a better example of powerful, aggressive pure metal in 2010 is going to take some doing.

Chasing the Grail shows how far Fozzy has become since their early days playing covers for a lark. It also confirms Jericho's abilities as a vocalist and songwriter, and Ward's devastating ability as a guitarist. The Duke's arsenal of catchy riffs is astounding and his lead guitar work is equally fearsome; there can be no question that he is one of the most under-rated players in metal. He's assisted here and there by Jeff Waters shredding the frets on a couple of tracks including the enormously grooving "Martyr No More", but this is not a guest-laden volume like All That Remains. This is Fozzy, pure and simple.

"Under Blackened Skies" is a huge opener that would overshadow every other song on an album by a lesser band, but Chasing the Grail is full of tracks just as good. "Let the Madness Begin" is a full-tilt rocker inspired by and sounding rather like Ozzy Osbourne around his Bark at the Moon period, "Pray for Blood" is complete savagery. Then again, "New Day's Dawn" is a misstep as it veers from poppy ballad (with Ward singing in a ridiculous falsetto) to a heavy grind and "God Pounds His Nails" is just OK. "Paraskavedekatriaphobia (Friday The 13th)" gets things back on track with some vicious cross-cutting riffs and "Revival" is also a keeper with a Gothic-sounding organ adding a second layer to the driving guitar attack.

As good as Chasing the Grail is up to this point, it is the final track that takes it to another level of awesome. "Wormwood" is Jericho's adaptation of the Book of Revelation, a 14-minute progressive power metal epic. Featuring a multitude of tempo changes, orchestration, a choir and some face-melting guitar from the song's composer and arranger, former member Mike Martin, this is the track that ultimately establishes Fozzy as a serious act, with no input from Rich Ward at all!

Chasing the Grail is a fabulous metal album, one of the best pure metal releases of this year for sure.

1. Under Blackened Skies
2. Martyr No More
3. Grail
4. Broken Soul
5. Let the Madness Begin
6. Pray for Blood
7. New Day's Dawn
8. God Pounds His Nails
9. Watch Me Shine
10. Paraskavedekatriaphobia (Friday the 13th)
11. Revival
12. Wormwood*

Rating: 89%

maudlin of the Well: Part the Second

Produced by Toby Driver
Released: May 2009

maudlin of the Well existed within a small niche of the heavy metal universe occupied by a very few: In the Woods... and Agalloch being two of the others. Their 2001 twin albums Bath and Leaving Your Body Map were experimental volumes that combined a wildly eclectic range of styles under the umbrella of the band's self-declared "astral metal" -- basically music created during experiments with astral projection, given emphasis by Jason Byron's dream-like lyrics. In 2003 the band split up after Byron left and Toby Driver formed Kayo Dot with three or four of the others (motW had up to nine members at that point). That band was/is essentially maudlin of the Well with all the aggressive metal aspects excised--the blast beats, the harsh vocals, the tremolo picking and the doom riffs--and the "astral" songwriting element replaced by a sort of abstract stream-of-consciousness approach. So, more or less the same thing only without the metal or the New Age woo-wooery. A year or so back, some motW fans got together and put up the dollars for Driver and some of his former bandmates to restore and record a bunch of early tracks that had never been released. This spectacular act of musical socialism allowed Part the Second to be released as a free download from the band's website.

And what a piece of work it is. Part the Second is five tracks of progressive chill-out music that sprawls majestically across almost 46 minutes. With none of the harsher, heavier metal sections of motW, this feels more like an early Kayo Dot release and logically bridges the gap between both bands. The epically titled first track "An Excerpt from 6,000,000,000,000 Miles Before the First, or, the Revisitation of the Blue Ghost" is an elaborate musical saga almost 12 minutes in duration that fuses 70s-style prog with post-rock elements, a diverse array of acoustic and non-rock instruments and whispery lead vocals. The next song opens on bells and vibes in the dreamlike tapestry of an avant-garde film soundtrack, becoming even stranger with the injection of violins later on. Strings and piano dominate "Rose Quartz Turning to Glass" which also features some interesting vocals.

Part the Second leaves its greatest treasures until the final track, "Laboratories of the Invisible World (Rollerskating the Cosmic Palmistric Postborder)", which swells into a glorious extended guitar solo about halfway through that is reminiscent of Pink Floyd's more transcendental moments. This is perhaps the most maudlin-like track on the album and a final confirmation on just how great this band was. That Part the Second lacks motW's more extreme musical elements is only slightly disappointing as it was the precise juxtaposition of the various styles that made the band's music so special; however, even without them this is an exceptional album of fluid musical experimentation and dexterity. And it's free, so you lose nothing by checking it out.

1. Excerpt from 6,000,000,000,000 Miles Before the First, or, the Revisitation of the Blue Ghost
2. Another Excerpt: Keep Light Near You, Even When Dying
3. Rose Quartz Turning to Glass
4. Clover Garland Island
5. Laboratories of the Invisible World (Rollerskating the Cosmic Palmistric Postborder)

Rating: 95%

DAYSEND: Within the Eye of Chaos

Released: Yesterday

After almost three years, Daysend has at last unleashed album number three. Both of the previous albums still get high rotation around the Sound Cellar so I was looking forward to Within the Eye of Chaos with particular interest. A few listens later and I have to admit that I'm not as excited about it as I was for The Warning nor for Severance, which remains one of my favourite Australian metal releases.

Yesterday I reviewed Tirades by labelmates Dyscord, and noted that with each subsequent release they strive to get heavier and further away from their early commercial pretensions. Daysend appear set to do the exact opposite. Within the Eye of Chaos is the most accessible album they've issued so far, the closest they have come yet to the ultimate model of popular melodic metalcore. It is perhaps the album this band has always aimed to make, the starkest combination yet of their distinctly metal background influences and clearly marketable aspirations.

Stripped down to a four piece, the guitar sound does seem slightly sparser but the band is no less heavy and Aaron Bilbija's astonishing gift for catchy riffs remains as potent as ever. While they still haven't managed to quite top "Born is the Enemy" in terms of memorability, "See You in My Nightmares" is the perfect album opener with a hook that's hard to shake. It's likely this one is already a crowd favourite. Daysend's penchant for vicious riffs is clearly evident, and Mark McKernan's clean vocal style is further developed. This makes the band's insidious melodies even more prominent but as the album goes on, it also drags them towards the generic style of so many other groups; indeed, after a few choruses I had to check I wasn't listening to All That Remains by mistake.

Tracks like the ferocious "Mindless" show Daysend hasn't shed their more metallic aspects just yet, but then the very next song "The Coldest of Disasters" opens immediately on clean melodic vocal lines that shows a distinctly different and more obvious personality. Somewhat more expansive cuts like "Simple Minds" hearken back to the style of The Warning, but it's clear that on Within the Eye of Chaos Daysend has set their sights on a much wider audience. All said, this is another very good album from Daysend, but one that clearly delineates the departure point from one dominant style to another far more accessible one. This may not be to the liking of fans who've been with them from the beginning, but it's possible Within the Eye of Chaos will net Daysend their biggest audience yet.

1. See You in My Nightmares
2. Mindless
3. The Coldest of Disasters
4. Questions
5. Simple Minds
6. Without Tears
7. In This Moment
8. Acid Laced Fiasco
9. Down This Hole
10. Edge of the Line
11. Recoil

Rating: 72%

DYSCORD: Tirades

Released: Today

The band with the longest and funniest "influences" list on MySpace returns with their second and much improved album, Tirades. While it wasn't a band album in itself, I wasn't overly impressed with the previous album Dakota as I felt it stumbled along the lines of generic safety and familiarity a little too much. This new instalment doesn't stray far from the last one's musical style, but two years and a bunch of live work later, Dyscord sounds much more comfortable in their own skin.

Notable almost immediately is that Dyscord is now a remarkably much heavier band, and the clean vocals that let them down in the past have been totally ditched. Tirades also sees the band move away from the saturated and stagnated metalcore arena completely and instead focus their energies on groove-heavy death metal, a growing abundance of guitar solos and much more memorable songs. One of the things I noted about Dakota was the band's level of consistency and this rings true once again, yet while it remains the case they still seem to recycle the occasional riff here and there on Tirades the tracks stand out from each other a lot more. The album's best and longest cut "The Murderhorn" shows just how far Dyscord has come from their frankly formulaic debut EP back in 2006, constantly changing tempos with a flagrant disregard of conventional structure. Closer "The Apparatus" is equally as impressive, moving from an omnious chugging riff with a menacing melody line then exploding into double-kick frenzy and James Herbert's multi-tracked roars. The very experienced Jason Suecof pulls a typically excellent sound, highlighting Dyscord's melodic strengths and groove-laden power.

They may not be the most original or groundbreaking band but these nine tracks confirm Dyscord's real potential as a burgeoning force on the local metal scene. Tirades is everything they've promised in the past and more.

1. Behold
2. You Sir, Are a Gentleman and a Scholar
3. The Flaming Catharsis
4. Beneath the Callous
5. The Murderhorn
6. Saguntum
7. Divergence
8. Hard Times Make Virtuous People
9. The Apparatus

Rating: 78%

WATCH YOU BLEED: The Saga of Guns N Roses

by Stephen Davis

Published by Penguin

In his autobiography, Slash basically calls Stephen Davis' Led Zeppelin chronicle Hammer of the Gods self-indulgent bullshit. Davis most likely read that as part of his "research" for this, his 400-plus account of the career of the 1980s' last great rock band, which could account for why he spends so much of this book slagging off the guitarist and the rest of his dysfunctional crew of egotists, control freaks, junkies and boozehounds. Guns N' Roses may well have been among the most selfish and dispicable group of musicians ever to sleaze out of a Hollywood gutter -- misogynistic, drug-addled, violent, unrepentent, obnoxious and disgraceful -- but a biographer's job should be to provide balance. Whatever their faults, and there are many, Guns N' Roses still stands as one of the greatest bands of all time, a band whose Appetite for Destruction album is still the highest-selling debut record by any artist ever. 23 years after it came out. So GnR may well be scumbags, but they deserve a much better biography than this.

Watch You Bleed, for all its readability and occasional jaw-dropping moments, falls down on a number of levels. And it falls hard: Davis, the man who co-wrote an Aerosmith biography, incorrectly identifies the release year of that band's Draw the Line album as 1979. He refers to Paul Stanley as "the bass player from Kiss", calls Skid Row a trio from Philadelphia with a Canadian singer, and claims that Slippery When Wet was Bon Jovi's debut. He gets dates wrong (like Axl Rose's birthdate), misidentifies locations and even suggests Hendrix burned a Les Paul at Woodstock. I do more fact-checking when I write a review than this guy did writing an entire book. Worse, every mistake I just listed should simply have not even been made by a dude who wrote books about Zeppelin and Aerosmith. But really, Davis didn't so much as author a book as string together a bunch of interviews and chapter-long personal opinion pieces about their work.

I loved Guns N' Roses (still do!) and devoured everything I could find about them, so re-reading masses of quotes from Kerrang!, RIP and dozens of other mags from the period was a nice trip down memory lane, but nothing I didn't already know. Indeed, there's almost nothing here that a long-time Gunners fan wouldn't have read or heard about somewhere else: magazines, Slash's and Mick Wall's books, TV. Davis tries to compete with The Dirt by dedicating a few hundred pages to the various members' debaucheries, but it rings hollow because The Dirt was actually written by Mötley Crüe. No one from Guns N' Roses had any input into this book at all.

Not only is this an unofficial cash-in, originally released in hardback around the time Chinese Democracy was released, but it's a lazy one. Even with the possibly that Davis was probably only given months to complete this in time to coincide with the launch of the most anticipated album in rock history, Watch You Bleed is pretty half-arsed. It did make me want to listen to Appetite for Destruction again though, so some good did come out of it.

ROB ZOMBIE: Hellbilly Deluxe 2

Produced by Rob Zombie

Released: February 2, 2010

For a while it seemed as if Rob Zombie had forsaken his musical career in favour of auteuristic film-making, but after more than a year sitting in a can somewhere, his fourth solo album has at last seen the light of day. Hellbilly Deluxe 2: Noble Jackals, Penny Dreadfuls and the Systematic Dehumanization of Cool is the logical companion to his 1999 effort and is a direct return to his signature sound after the darker and unpopular Educated Horses album.

The original Hellbilly Deluxe was one of the most rambunctious albums of its year of release, a fun and catchy if imminently disposable slice of gaudy schlock rock. Its "sequel" -- if the word can be used -- tries to be the same yet doesn't quite pull it off. Recycling the original's campy, B-grade, sexploitation-film style artwork and the standard trashy grooves he's used on everything he's ever done, Hellbilly Deluxe 2 is pretty much the same style-over-substance vibe of stripclub horror metal as before, but without all the hooks. Where the first Hellbilly was dominated by memorable, shout-along tracks like "Dragula", "Meet the Creeper" and "Superbeast", this one doesn't really stick in your head. "Sick Bubblegum" gives it a go, but after the fifth or sixth "Yeah, motherfucker, yeah motherfucker, yeah!" it feels as if his heart just isn't in it. "Werewolf, Baby!" (one of two --two! -- songs about werewolves) is a throwback to the punkish grooves of White Zombie and the bluesy acoustic guitars of "Mars Need Women" are a nicely interesting touch.

John 5 does some very cool 60s surf-guitar inspired work on "Werewolf Women of the SS" which results in the catchiest song on the album, although it's a bit late in the playlist to save the rest of it. "The Man Who Laughs" is pretty hook-y too but Zombie overplays his hand (naturally) by including a pointless, not-very-interesting four minute long drum solo that totally ruins it. In the end, it's catchy enough, and it's Rob Zombie so there's fun to be had, but doesn't stand up to the first one.

1. Jesus Frankenstein
2. Sick Bubblegum
3. What?
4. Mars Need Women
5. Werewolf, Baby!
6. Virgin Witch
7. Death and Destiny Inside the Dream Factory
8. Burn
9. Cease to Exist
10. Werewolf Women of the SS
11. The Man Who Laughs

Rating: 62%