Line-up: Bartosz „Barth La Picard“ Zrebiec - guitars, vocals , synth, Bartosz „Orson“ Koprowski - bass, Lukasz „Lucass“ Boratyn – drums

I thought, the name of the album - evoking a sulphur-smelling „tempter“ and the genre name “melodic heavy metal” - didn’t fit together. So, I was quite curious to hear the content of the album by Polish band Grimlord. Since listening to the first song, it was clear that the genre name is not important – in the music you can hear almost every (metal) genre except for the death metal.

Really, even at the beginning of the song “Dolce Vita Sath-an as” you are knocked to the ground by an industrial black metal passage turning totally without scruples into a melodic power metal lick followed by a “heavy” strophe. Well, I don’t know whether I’ve ever heard such a mix of black and heavy metal. However, in view of the fact that I don’t suffer from neo-phobia, the music didn’t cause me trauma. Quite the opposite! After I had listened to the song five times, I started to enjoy it … and when I had listened to it ten times, I started to sing (or scream) “Doooolce Viiiita Saaaath-an aaaas“. (Of course, volume was set to the maximum because I didn’t want to risk my neighbors hearing my “art of singing”.)

The strong points of Grimlord are melodies. They’re sometimes really catchy. The following two songs are quite similar to the first one. However, since the fourth song (“Shade OF Wrath Angels”) there’s a change. Till the last song (“Lamentation Sword”) there’s no vocal note. Yes (as you may suppose), till the end of the album there are only instrumental songs. It’s not that it’s wrong – not at all, but I did miss the vocals, Barth La Picars has quite an interesting voice – it’s neither black metal “croaking”, nor death metal “grunting” … neither thrash metal “screaming”, nor power metal “clear” voice. In my opinion, it distinguishes the band from any other one and it’s a pity that the last songs are “only” instrumental. But on the other hand, they’re melodically rich and contain too many riffs etc. to contain voice. To certain extend, there’s s lot of progress and some passages are fairly “soaked” with doom metal atmosphere.

Well, maybe Grimlord miscalculated a bit - each song is excellent but as a whole it barely holds together. If it was a “best of” album, it’d be OK, but as an ordinary album… Grimlord do have potential, they just need to learn how to use it.