Horns and Hammers

Ignitor are always haunted by their failure to live up to the massive potential of their debut Take To The Sky, which was such an infectious, hooky slab of classic Heavy Metal that I still won't shut up about it twenty years later. They just have never managed to sound as fresh, as catchy, and as excited as they did on that disc, and nothing they have done since has come close. It doesn't help that they lost original singer Erika Swinnich/Tandy/Morgengrau fifteen years ago and got a downgrade when they enlisted former Dangerous Toys singer Jason McMaster as their new front.

This is a bit of a step up from their last album, the tepid Golden Age of Black Magick. Mainstay guitarist Stuart Laurence maintains a feel for a swinging hook, but a lot of these songs struggle to create real identity, and they tend to run together. McMasters sounds better on this one than he usually does, mostly because he is overproduced to hell and back, so his flaws are more covered up than usual. His vocal lines are still not great, but they're not painful, so he is at least not hurting the proceedings. This reminds me a lot of the stuff we used to get from bands like Gothic Knights in their later period, or more recent Attacker. It's not bad, really, but it doesn't have a whole lot to recommend it.