Dark Lord's Landing

As one of the godfathers of the Gothenburg sound, you just can’t deny the impact that Dark Tranquillity had on the face of metal music when bursting onto the scene back in 1989. Some 27 years of service, 10 albums, and many imitators later, and the Swedes are still going strong as they unleash album number 11.
Despite founding member and main songwriter Martin Henriksson departing the fold earlier this year, it’s pretty much business as usual for Dark Tranquillity here as thrashy opener Encircled kicks things off in fine style and the likes of the storming Neutrality and The Pitiless go on to whip up a melodeath storm…

With the split between McCluskey and the rest of the band resolved by the former's decision to carry on with the band's name on his own, the question before Sugar Tax's appearance was whether the change would spark a new era of success for someone who clearly could balance artistic and commercial impulses in a winning fashion. The answer, based on the album - not entirely. The era of Architecture and Morality wouldn't be revisited anyway, for better or for worse, but instead of delightful confections with subtle heft like "Enola Gay" and "Tesla Girls," on Sugar Tax McCluskey is comfortably settled into a less-spectacular range of songs that only occasionally connect…

Although Germany had its place in rock & roll's evolution in the 1960s, it was primarily as an incubator for British bands playing grueling stints in Hamburg, not for homegrown talent. The Lords were about the best of a weak scene, populated by bands that could never seem to shake themselves free of stodgy Central European oom-pah folk traditions. Quite popular in their own country, the Lords made no impression in the English-speaking world until a couple of decades later, when reappreciation of '60s beat and garage music became so intense that collectors began to investigate the strange and wonderful world of Continental '60s rock.

A seasoned American hard rock troupe with roots in AOR and glam metal, America's House of Lords convened in 1987 after the dissolution of keyboardist Gregg Giuffria's previous ensemble, Giuffria. The band saw success with their 1988 eponymous debut, which was released by Kiss bassist Gene Simmons' RCA imprint, and again with 1990's Sahara and 1992's Demons Down, but the onset of grunge dulled the group's commercial momentum, and they spent the remainder of the decade on hiatus. House of Lords reconvened in the mid-2000s sans Giuffria with vocalist/guitarist James Christian at the fore and have gone on to issue a string of dynamic melodic rock efforts like Come to My Kingdom (2008), Indestructible (2015), and New World - New Eyes (2020), all of which have been released on Frontiers Records.