W.A.S.P. - Golgotha

Published October 08 2015

*=Staff's pick	Scream Last Runaway Shotgun Miss You* Fallen Under* Slaves Of The New World Order* Eyes Of My Maker Hero Of The World* Golgotha

Genre	Heavy Metal	Blackie Lawless	Vocals
Tracks	9	Blackie Lawless	Guitar
Running time	56 Min.	Doug Blair	Guitar
Label	Napalm Records	Mike Duda	Bass
Release	October 02, 2015	Mike Dupke	Drums
Country	USA	Blackie Lawless	Keyboard
Producer	-
Similar artists	---

W.A.S.P.'s first record in 6 years to me personally sounds like a mixture of the band's second album The Last Command, some influences of the 70's, attempts to feed off the success of The Crimson Idol album and finally and most of all, like the major part of the stuff made from 2001's Unholy Terror and forward to 2009's Babylon record.

Specifically the guitar playing is sometimes strongly reminiscent of what they did in the mid 80's and the early 90's and the album's total production and drum play are both pretty much similar to what's been brought to the table in the 2000's. This, all of the above together, obviously doesn't make this record to something groundbreaking at all and the overall sound picture presented is making the last drops of originality dry out really quick.

I basically really like this band's musical approach and style, but I also have to admit that much of what I hear on Golgotha, without getting into details too much of course, have already been kind of frequently used before in different forms on their previous efforts. If I however ignore what this unit has come out with on a regular basis during the new millennium, this album indeed is a really great piece of music and a creation which I without a doubt listen to repeatedly.

Blackie's voice comes out just fine on studio recordings still. It's definitely a different situation in the live environment, with a lot of vocals pre-recorded, but naturally, on a record of 2015, it's not as easy to discover how much artists are cheating and maybe it doesn't matter since I reckon that a better end result is what ultimately counts.

The songs on Golgotha are absolutely highly satisfying and I guess that with this amount of space between the band's last record and this one, Blackie has had plenty of time to come up with mighty melodies and nice long guitar sequences on a couple of songs and in the end I think that this record is able to find its way up to a prominent position in the band's partly exquisite discography.

See also review of: Babylon , Dominator , The Neon God Part I , The Neon God Part II

Performance	Originality	Production	Vocals	Songwriting
7	4	7	6	8

Summary
8 chalices of 10 - Tobbe