Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 8.5/10
The year never ends with a whimper, it only ever finishes with a crash, a moment of lengthy feedback and the surge of electricity flowing through the veins. It is the swell of vision from an artist’s mind that creates an excitement for the following year, not the spectacle of a thousand fireworks screaming towards the dead black sky and the rivets, the joists, the framework of that can only truly come from someone in the Metal Family and who better than Dean Wallace.
There will be those that never understand the call or the mimic of the foundry, the clash of molten fire against hardened and fortified steel, of the squeal of a guitar as she’s being taken on a long and fruitful journey, to those the Metal Family just doesn’t call out to, instead it redoubles its efforts every so often to find someone to whom a crown can feel enlightened by. Europe may been leading the way of late, in fact in many ways it has created a wonderful stranglehold on the genre, but in the form of Dean Wallace and his album Metal Family, there could be a shift in perspective.
Metal Family is not just cool, it flows and boils like a furnace being carefully stoked and tended by the most expert of blacksmiths, the forge upon which the tracks are bound, wrought and gleaned over by the listener leaves the sludge of a hundred bands to whom have tried to make an impact but who have regretfully failed and the prize, the gleaming accolade held aloft like some modern day version of Excalibur is to be fought over once more and Dean Wallace certainly has a finger upon the gilded handle.
Tracks such as The New Slavery, I’m Not A Hero, the superb The Ferryman of Soul and the innate bleakness that lives just below the radar in Flying Coffin are prizes well worth chasing after, they are the beasts to be cherished and the feeling of abundant wealth, of listening to a new member of the family holding their own in good company, is not to be dismissed easily.
If this is Metal Family then there will be many new fans claiming a relationship with the songs on offer by Dean Wallace, a stormingly cool association, a set of songs forged perfectly.
Ian D. Hall