After releasing ”Crimen Excepta” in April 2012, Polish heavy metal act Crystal Viper are re-releasing their first two albums through AFM records, complete with bonus tracks. ”The curse of Crystal viper” gets five bonus tracks while ”Metal nation” gets six bonus tracks. In terms of vocals, Marta has a traditional heavy metal vocal style, similar…

Italian Heavy metal/Thrash metal band Athemis were formed in 1999 by Andrea Martongelli. Since then they’ve released six studio albums. It’s only in the last two or three years they’ve really started to become well known in the UK, thanks to appearances at Bloodstock, Hard Rock Hell and Hammerfest and releasing their ”Pop up your…

Armonight are an Italian band who play gothic metal with female vocals. As with many bands, that’s a massive simplification – in reality the music has many different influences and doesnt sit neatly in one genre, so although Gothic metal is the best fit, they also have touches of Rock, melodic rock, symphonic metal and…

Bullet are a heavy metal band from Växjö in Sweden. They released their debut album ”Heading for the top” in 2006, and followed this with ”Bite the Bullet” (2008) and ”Highway pirates” (2011). Now they are back with their fourth album, ”Full pull”. The band have played plenty of their own shows and also done…

Forty years ago, Neil Diamond played 10 sold out nights at the Greek theatre in Los Angeles, an open air amphitheatre holding around 5700 people – thats a lot of people over a ten night run. The album ”Hot August night” was recorded at one of those shows, and on release it became a massive…

Aimee Mann is an American singer/songwriter whose music mixes rock, pop and folk. It’s a hard style to describe, but the closest artists I can think of are KT Tunstall and Amy MacDonald as they also blur the pop/rock boundaries and with Amy MacDonald in particular using the acoustic guitar then there are certainly similarities….

The Emperors of Wyoming are a country/folk rock band. Hearing that then if asked to name some bands they’re linked to, its unlikely that you’d pick Nirvana, Sonic Youth, Smashing Pumpkins, House of Pain or Garbage, but linked they are. If you look further down this review at the list of band members you’ll notice…

Pianist Otmar Binder is joined by Alexander Lackner (Bass) and Michael Strasser (Drums) to form the Otmar Binder Trio. Together with BJ Cole (Pedal Steel) and multi-instrumentalist Christian Dozzler, they have recorded this album – Boogie Woogie Turnaround. As the name suggests, the music is Boogie-Woogie, a form of music that was very popular back…

Frontiers/BAM Youthful new Swedish AOR band WIGELIUS was probably founded after vocalist Anders Wigelius sang JOURNEY´s top hit “Don´t Stop Believin´ “ on Swedish TV. Raised on the likes of RICHARD MARX, JOURNEY and FOREIGNER there was precious little debate of how the band would sound. Luckily brother Erik plays drums and Anders himself seems…

Frontiers/BAM I remember this lot from the early nineties, but I didn´t know they formed as early as 1983. They flet quite fresh-faced and young back then… Their self-titled 1990 debut gave them hits like “Give It to Me Good” and “One in a Million”, and secured the release of their sophomore effort “Hear!”, the…

Frontiers/BAM RICHARD MARX started out with a single, “Don´t Mean Nothing”, in 1987, talk about a misleading title! From then on he released an album, and ended up selling three million copies! In 1989, “Repeat Offender” sold an amazing seven million copies, not least vanguard by the single “Right Here Waiting”. Live, studio and compilation…