Angel Blake – Angel Blake Review
Posted by Evocator Manes on 05.02.2006
Surprise breakout from the ashes of The Crown.
Angel Blake Angel Blake
2006
Metal Blade
10
Like many people, the break-up of The Crown hit me particularly hard and when I heard that Johan Lindstrand was going to be making a new metal troupe, being perhaps the most visible "face" of the band, I was admittedly most interested in his work. I had heard of Angel Blake, but when I heard he was going to play the entire album by himself and was going for more of the softer, acoustic-type stuff with clean vocals, my immediate thought was to steer clear. It is a very good thing I did not, for if I had, I would have missed out on a tremendous heavy metal album and there never seem to be enough of those.
In many ways, Angel Blake is much closer to the sound of The Crown than is Lindstrand's project, also reviewed elsewhere here. Marko Tervonen is a jaw-droppingly brilliant musician, as evidenced by how skillfully he not only plays all the instruments, including some seriously kickass drum beats, but also assembles the pieces and layers the vocals. His talent also extends to production work (he built a studio with some serious capabilities before tracking) as this thing just sounds absolutely great, maybe the best-sounding metal album I've heard since the Cans solo project, Beyond The Gates (coming up in a future Time Machine column or already posted, depending on when you read this).Tervonen also chose particularly well in finding a vocalist to fit the music when he tapped former Transport League frontman Tony Jelencovich for the duties. Jelencovich was leading Mnemic at the time and has since departed from that act. His varied vocals really add a great deal to the songs.
The songwriting is so skillful and the arrangements so perfect and the playing so adept that one can only marvel over and over again at this album. It's certainly not The Crown, but it ain't bad, either. It is, in fact, one of the best and most diverse metal albums out in a long time and is far and away the best metal album released this year, as well as a definite frontrunner for Album Of The Year. It will be interesting to see how well this album, given that it's unfortunately on Metal Blade, who are promoting it the way they promote everything else (I bought it on a whim at the music store, basically, because it was on sale) and it's nowhere near the extreme end of things somewhat occupied by The Crown. In fact, it's a far cry from death metal, though as might be expected, a lot of the elements are very reminiscent of The Crown, particularly the doubled guitars and syncopation. The heavy riffs are here, but changed up with quieter moments and some of the most engaging guitar work heard in a long while.
The artwork features the band's goat head logo. Simple, direct, to the point and boring. The inside of the booklet is also a mess, with some cool drawings on the inside of various objects, including the band members punctuated by a disastrous rendering of the album lyrics in one of the more nonsensical formats I've ever had the displeasure to witness. The back cover has the album titles in black copy, on a dark background, which itself is fading to black. Brilliant idea there. Credits are in the book and overall the artwork is serviceable, but definitely nothing more.
The 411: The surprise sleeper album of the year, not a dead song on this album, just sheer brilliance from start to end. The staging, instruments, sound, everything is on point here and done to perfection. It is hard to find any faults here, aside from the artwork, but the artwork was never the major selling point of death metal anyway and given how much a part and how heavily influential he was in that genre, it's no surprise that Tervonen carries some of that over into this project. This is everything metal should be.
