Orna Verum

I have a long history with this band, going back to my early days with this site, and I have been a fan of them for twenty years now. I thought their 2007 album Once in a Blue Moon was a high point, but after that the band suffered some setbacks that resulted in the permanent loss of vocalist Wes Waddell. It took 11 years for them to release their comeback Last Act of Defiance, and I wasn't really wild about it. Now with a new singer I hoped they would rack up another classic like Lost in Hell.

The songwriting on this is strong, with that mix of progressive melody and retro-metal riffage the band has always done well with. Nobody else really sounds like Seasons of the Wolf, who are as much Blue Oyster Cult and Cirith Ungol as anything more modern.

New singer Robert Baxter is kind of a letdown. He has a lower-pitched instrument that does not pierce through the music like Wes did, but I can tell he has the potential to grow into a solid frontman. The problem here is that he is often definitively off-key, and just when he starts to sound like he is getting into the groove he will wail off with a long, off note and you will wince. The melodies are good, if he was actually on them, but about 25% of the time he is not. Then they stack up backing vocals, and that just sounds worse, because you can't harmonize if the main vocal is off.

So this is a mix of some really good Seasons of the Wolf music in their classic mode, mixed in with some vocals that I would charitably describe as "iffy." Baxter has the stuff, he just needs practice, and the band should not settle for this kind of performance in the future.