Review Metalium - Grounded: Chapter Eight 2009

Tracks
1. Heavy Metal
2. Light Of Day
3. Pay For Fee
4. Pharos Slavery
5. Crossroad Overload
6. Falling Into Darkness
7. Alone
8. Borrowed Time
9. Once Loyal
10. Lonely

Band:
Tolo Grimalt - Guitar
Henning Basse - Vocals, keyboards
Matthias Lange - Guitar
Lars Ratz - Bass
Michael Ehré - Drums

Discography:
Millennium Metal: Chapter One (1999)
State of Triumph: Chapter Two (2000)
Hero Nation: Chapter Three (2002)
As One: Chapter Four (2004)
Demons of Insanity: Chapter Five (2005)
Nothing to Undo: Chapter Six (2007)
Incubus: Chapter Seven (2008)

Released 09/25/09
Recenserad 09/29/09

Links:
metalium.de
myspace
massacre

I have to admit to being a big sci-fi fanatic, but really what does that have to do with Metalium? You might wonder that and wonder you should. It is like this that the band has sci-fi themes to their lyrics, which makes me think of band like for instance Ayreon or Star One which are of course fantastic bands and also spikes my expectations for this record. Another thing is that the band names their records as chapters much like Saga has been doing for many years with a few songs of each record to form a gigantic puzzle. These facts makes my hopes fairly high for this German band that has seen many great musicians in their past history, names I will not mention here as they would only be waste of space.

So, does the band deliver on their promises? Well stay tuned and you will soon find out what I think about this record.

Musically we end up in the German territories which of course might not really be that strange as the band hail from that very nation. Musically that means that the band plays speedy and quite melodic metal with lots of emphasis on the guitars and with some nice fills of the keyboards in order to spice it all up, think bands like Helloween or Gamma Ray if you know these, those are typical German bands, Metalium falls into the same cathegory.

Metalium also carries a sort of macho heavy metal attitude which they of course hope reflect on the music. However, this does not really happen, the band is quite typical when it comes to the music. Their songs mostly sound like they could have come from anything in the genre and I know as I have a rather vast collection of records from that genre and the music on this eight chapter sounds like most of the rejected pile I have of records from the genre, records I no longer play.

This record starts out with a song called simply Heavy Metal and it starts with a statement that goes like this: “we are heavy metal, if you don’t like it, Fuck You!” which is kind of super cliché and not really rebellious at all. The songs over all are rather good but there is the feeling of “I’ve heard this before” which never can be good.

The second song of the record has a nice depth and heavy feel to it and with a nice mood which makes it my fave on the record and it also spikes my interest for a while. In the end however I find that this record can’t hold up my interest all the way through and in the end I feel that this band is doing things routinely copying themselves as well as others.

No I can’t really find anything that can interest me with this record, hopefully the second time I hear a record by Metalium it will be more interesting. It seems like Metalium are skilled musicians but they lack the all important creativity and identity which makes this record go into the master pile of uninteresting records.

Pain Crawls in the Night

HHHHHHH