Widow - On Fire

*=Staff's pick	An American Werewolf in Raleigh* The Preacher's Daughter* Here to Stay Re-Animate Her Sinderella Not Alone Dead End Misstery Family Affair* I'll Bury You Alive*

Genre	Metal	Lili, Cristoff	Vocals
Tracks	10	Cristoff	Guitar
Runningtime	44 Min.	John E	Guitar
Label	Cruz Del Sur	Joshua	Bass
Release	28 June 2005	Marc Anthony	Drums
Country	USA	-	Keyboards
Similar artists	3 Inches Of Blood, Doro, Warlock

So evidently, if you are patient, pray to the proper gods, offer up the proper scarifices, by summer you shall be rewarded. I have waited, freezing my grizzled old ass this dreary winter, for this disc.

The highlights? Hell, it's hard to find something not to like about "On Fire". The cover art is properly oldschool cheesy-"I'm soooooo MET-ALL" poses with Jackson guitars, an upraised fist, a drummer throwing horns ( \M/ ), all completely surrounded by a gorgeous inferno of orange CG flame and a huge burning logo in a properly classically gothic font burning above it all-it's enough to make you yearn to raze a small village just for fun-and that's without hearing a single track yet.

I've got to admit - I remember a hard rock band called "Widow" from around 1983, about the sametime I was first discovering n bands like Anvil, Grim Reaper, and Anthrax in my homeland, and I wondered if this was not some long resurrected spectre of that band, which also sported a female singer.This would have been a time in history in which only a handful of labelled bands had a song based on Stephen King's "The Stand", with the hard-rock Widow and Anthrax being chief among them. Such things are possible in the realm of nostalgia metal, you know: consider the constant reinvention of Doro Pesch and the unholy return of a much-battered Diamondhead at Wacken '03. These events are sometimes (Doro) but not often (Diamondhead) pretty. The press sheet was blessedly brief, and I perused it enough to determine this was not a case of under-deserved reanimation, but a younger, fresher approach to traditional NWOBHM-era wickedness.

Widow is a solid conglomeration of all the cheesy, testosterone pumping gadgets that made heavy metal fun in the first fucking place-slashing relentless guitar attacks, horror movie imagery, two-string harmonic runs, and absolutely no pretensions to be other than what this band appears at first glance to be - a old school fucking MET-ALL band. Fun, fun, fun-we've got movie soundtrack intros (An American Werewolf in Raleigh), reanimated corpses, nasty thoughts and naughty lyrics (Sinderella/Misstery/A Family Affair)-all properly dark, brooding and purely metal. As a total package,the band hits the mark for total mid-80's hedonistic cheese-and brethren, there be NOTHING wrong with cheese, if you're hungry enough. As a label, Cruz Del Sur has left me scratching my head and wondering "what the fuck?" only a time or two in the last couple of years-certainly not this time, solidifying it's place as my favourite little indie prog label.

One last note: Widow employs a device also currently in use by 3 Inches of Blood, combining death metal growls and black metal screams as counterpoints to traditional NWOBHM vocals. This works extremely well in the context of "On Fire" and with 3IOB, but it is a device that may suffer from overuse, so you upstarts come up with your own damn ideas from now on.

Production	Vocals	Compositions
9	10	9

Summary
9 chalices of 10 - Ogg The Barbarian