Pastore
The End Of Our Flames

It's never a good sign when the play count has reached around 20 runs and I still don't have an opinion about the album. Or even really know how it sounds unless I have it going in my ears. It's a bit like "Oh! This song, I know this one - soon they'll do this… no? Hmm".

The band name comes from the front man of the quartet and by Marios side we'll find a guitarist, a drummer and a bass player and even though two of these are new in the band it's Pastores second album. The record label makes a big deal around how the band has got two straight 90/100 from Japanese metal magazine Burrn! but I couldn't care less, frankly. They might just as well have written about what kinds of pets the members in the band have because that would at least have said something about them but what a rivaling music magazine writes is completely uninteresting to both me and my score. And every reviewer should feel the same. So let's drop that and look at what kind of album this is.

'The End Of Our Flames' is a powerful heavy metal album in the vein of the late 90's American approach to the genre with a high pitched falsetto possessed vocalist. The guitars are heavy and simple rather than melodic and complexed and the vocals are kind of demonic and very stretched but not that pretty or well made. I'd say no chance if anyone would claim that Mr Pastore is a graduated student from school of vocals because he's not very good - he sings more or less completely on emotion and can't even bring out a smooth voice when he tries, like in the ballad When The Sun Rises. There is however someone else going even more of the line, which is bass player Alexis Gallucci (a man with one of the funniest names I've heard - his and the rest of Pastores memebers). Mr Callucci is doing something with his instrument that I just can't get my head around because it's quite often that he's playing on something that sound like a completely different song compared to the rest of the band.

All these things matter, but the most serious problem with 'The End Of Our Flames' is not an exploring bassist and uneducated vocalist, the biggest problem is what I mentioned already in the beginning - that it's very hard to remember anything as soon as you've turned it off. All songs are quite anonymous but a bigger issue is that there are plenty of quite bad songs as well. There is a big share of songs that just feels completely bland and almost painful to hear, even though most of it feels pretty well made. I just feel that the band consist of some extremely immature guys that hasn't taken the songs seriously but just fooled around and still thinks they are the coolest people on earth - like a Brazilian version of Manowar, and they probably think they are as important as Manowar thinks too.

In my opinion, there are plenty of better albums within this genre but if you like this kind of high pitched vocals in powerful heavy metal then it should be an acceptable or even decent album. The biggest problem I see with them are the insipid songs and how everything just screams on this album. The instruments scream, the vocalist scream and the songs scream. However, I do think it sounds decent despite all of this so there are potential for the future. 'The End Of Our Flames', though, is at best average.

HHHHHHH