review: Herzel (France) -- traditional, melodic heavy metal debut album Le Dernier Rempart

Herzel

Le Dernier Rempart

Gates of Hell Records

19 March 2021

Herzel (France) is traditional heavy metal with melodic singing with lyrics in French, and in a few carefully selected places the album has some folk melodies, but they are certainly not a folk band. They are firmly rooted in legacy, classic-style heavy metal, and should be of interest to fans of that style, and also to fans of true metal and power metal. Here’s the thing about this band. We know that there are a lot of good bands in the international traditional heavy metal local scenes, but this genre has an Achilles’ heel, namely, the singing. Other genres have their own Achilles’ heel, like death metal’s generic growling; doom’s “average-dude-hollering” vocals; thrash’s faceless riffs and punk yelling, prog’s boringness, so on and so forth. Anyway, Herzel has good singing, and what a difference it is to hear a new traditional band when the singing works. In addition, the riffs work, and the shredding and soloing sounds awesome. The production is worthwhile, and shows the band’s desire to have the sound of real drums (This zine has no information about whether this is just good sampling or whether it is, in fact, real drums). In the singing there’s a bit of the high notes and whatnot, and that’s good. However, the singing voice has a natural melodic tone that makes it attractive. Such a good debut album.

Le Dernier Rempart by Herzel