Smookie Hell

HELL IN THE CLUB from Italy feature members of ELVENKING and SECRET SPHERE, from bands which play a totally different genre, though, but the songs delivered here on their fifth album to date are pure hard rock with lots of party attitude including hooks that can mostly be called anthems. CRAZY LIXX, CRASHDIET, (more recent) H.E.A.T. or even MÖTLEY CRÜE seem to have been major influences here. Luckily, the modern sounds – whatever this means – mentioned in the info sheet provided by the label can’t (hardly) be found at all. And “Lullaby For An Angel“ is a great ballad with a lot of eighties DNA. Nevertheless, there are a couple of songs which can’t fully meet the quality of highlights like the mentioned tracks or “Nostalgia“ and “Tokyo Lights“. A pretty solid album, though. An album with an honest and down-to-earth production which does want to sound perfect…

It's almost a blessing that, for legal reasons, this four-piece can't call itself Black Sabbath. It only serves to hammer home the point that with Ronnie James Dio up front and Vinny Appice in back, Tony Iommi and Geezer Butler express a very different side of their musical personalities than they ever did with Ozzy Osbourne on vocals and Bill Ward on drums. Where the original lineup was an ultra-heavy blues band, with a rhythm section that never failed to swing (OK, they failed a little bit on "Sweet Leaf"), when Dio came on board in 1980 the group was reinvented as a heavy metal juggernaut.