review: Solitude

Solitude (Japan)

Reach for the Sky

Test Your Metal Records

Solitude is high-quality traditional heavy metal built by veterans with tons, huge tons of experience. As a result, they are masters of the domain of the genre of leather and spikes. I won’t give you a history lesson right now because once you click on the links below you can find out for yourself. I’ll just tell you this: they started this band way back in 1996. That’s not all. The members of the band are in other bands, and those other bands’ origins reach right smack into the middle of the 1980s and the early 80s, too. Can you believe it?! This name is not very well known in North America, but headbangers can rectify that right now. People have observed that Solitude plays heavy metal with a near-thrash intensity or heaviness, including thick riffs and strong vocals. I take it that what they mean by that is that Solitude is heavy metal of strength. There is no weak link in this chain.

Let me tell you something else. If you generally don’t support heavy metal because you think that the genre is weak and soft, why don’t you challenge yourself and put your feet to the fire, and your ears to the iron, and find out just how wrong you are. With all the extreme metal around, people tend to forget that heavy metal is a prime genre for headbanging music big time.

This album is actually from 2015, but the good folks at Test Your Metal Records released it at the end of 2016 for those of us who have been living in a cave in North America. The band is characterized by gritty vocals, a rumbling bass guitar sound, and drumming that pounds the rhythms into your memory. They don’t do cheesie melodies, either, because they know what’s up. This is no cliché metal. In addition, due to the fact that these are veterans whose steel blood is possessed by heavy metal, the guitar work has many positive elements: riffs, hooks all over, solos, a strong sound and the sounds of masterful experience.

Enough! Go listen for yourself and bang your head. This is the sound of heavy metal masters. Begin the exploration of Solitude now.

testyourmetalofficial.com

testyourmetalofficial.com/solitude

facebook.com/solitudejapan

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review by MMB