Some albums in your youth just stand out and no matter how hard a band tries to recapture that essential energy of years gone by it tends to always be nostalgia that always wins over. I had that conversation with Ken Mary of Firth Angel a few weeks back (Check out the interview on the site) about the first Fifth Angel album released 36 years ago and the latest record ‘When Angels Kill’ just out in June.
I told him that the new record stood out because “It takes you back to a place that you’ve been before, and though the landscape has changed over time, you still get that same feeling you did the first time you heard that first record.” Ken mused on that, saying “It’s always hard to fight against nostalgia. I mean I love my favourite Iron Maiden albums because they’re the ones that I heard when I was young and that’s just the way it is. My favourite Rush albums are ‘Permanant Waves’ and ‘Moving Pictures’ because those are the albums that introduced me to those bands. And so when somebody says something like that I’m astounded because we’re fighting against nostalgia to a large degree, and it’s hard to win against nostalgia.”
My question to you, dear reader, is did you love that first Firth Angel LP as much as I did? If you did then pick up ‘When Angels Kill’ now because even though the debut edges it still the new record get’s as close as you ca to that feeling of hearing Fifth Angel for the first time.
Part of the reason the album might be so good is strangely because of Covid, which kept the album writing and recording progress going for two full years. That lengthy process certainly hasn’t dulled the energy on ‘When Angels Kill’ because the musicianship is amazing, te songs are strong and the planets are aligned perfectly!
Opening with ‘When Angels Kill’ the power is there from the off but so is ‘that’ sound – this is old school headbanging Metal of the finest variety and the band sounds like they are having a ball! And that is what you feel throughout the album – this is a record of quality songs, wonderfully played and very much reminiscent of the way Metal used to be!
There are of course changes, most notable of all of course the new vocalist Steven Carlson who does a fine jb here and production is simply wonderful. So whilst t doesn’t sound like their debut in the sense that there’s no sense of looking backward, it does capture the essence and at time I had hills and echoes of that wonderful first record.
Set as a concept record about a dystopian world on the brink of apocalypse, things are a little darker and heavier than previous releases and it actually works quite well i terms of telling a story. I personally recommend tracks like the Priest-like ‘We Are Immortal’ and the guitar attack of ‘Resist the Tyrant’ along with that opener. But you can’t go wrong really with anything here and you’ll be rocking away to ‘On Wings of Steel’, ‘Run to the Black’ and ‘Seven Angels’ which al hit the spot. Even the subdued ‘The End of Everything,’ is wonderfully orchestrated.
A sure-fire winner for me!
8 / 10