How many of you snoozed on Praises to the War Machine, the excellent solo CD released this past Spring by Nevermore crooner Warrel Dane? The Peter Wichers (ex-Soilwork)-produced effort, while not necessarily living up to the best of Nevermore, was a damn fine disc. As perhaps the album’s slowest number, “Brother” wouldn’t have been my choice for a video to represent the whole album — but it does capture the ethos of the disc pretty well while indulging in some of the finest metal cliches known to man (Warrel sitting in a leather arm chair surrounded by candles in a dark room = unequivocally METAL). Interestingly (and Dane deserves major props for this), the movie footage cut into this video is real stuff from his childhood, relating to the [depressing] subject matter of the song.

-VN

October, 2007 will go down as an interesting month for Gothenburg metal; we’ve effectively seen the release of two Soilwork albums. One, which bears the Soilwork namesake, is the first album written and recorded by the band without ex-guitarist and primary songwriter Peter Wichers. The second is essentially a Peter Wichers solo album released under the Nuclear Blast All Stars moniker — Wichers wrote, produced and played guitar and had a host of other musicians contribute their duties, including an A-list roster of singers, one for each song. Anders Friden (In Flames), Peter Tagtgren (Hypocrisy), John Bush (Anthrax), and Bjorn “Speed” Strid (Soilwork) all contribute vocals. Out of the Dark ends up being a solid listen, if not so much a proper album as a collection of songs. Nuclear Assault has drawn on their rich history to assemble a disc that’s a much more interesting — at least to these ears — version of the Roadrunner United compilation put out a couple of years back.

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