Guardian at the Gate

This looked promising, but it's not very good. Arctic Flame have produced three lackluster albums while mining the straight-up, beer-and-pretzels US Metal vein also worn so well by Gothic Knights, only GK produced one classic album before descending into this kind of pool-hall hard-rock inflected nonsense. Let me be clear: there are tracks on this album I could play and tell you it was a new Jackyl album and you would not have any reason to disbelieve me except that Jackyl were generally better than this. If you crave the barren wastes of mid-90's hard rock then yeah, this is a nice boring example of that. It has a rock-solid guitar tone, and some good riffing, but the songs are crap, and vocalist Michael Moore sounds so bored and uninterested in his own music you feel kind of bad for him. Pass.