Amulet - The First

Published September 24 2014

*=Staff's pick	Evil Cathedral Glint Of The Knife The Gauntlet Bloody Night Heathen Castle The Flight Talisman The Sacrifice Mark Of Evil* Wicked ´N Cruel* Black Candle Trip Forever Nightmare

Genre	Heavy Metal	Jamie Elton	Vocals
Tracks	13	Heathen Steven	Guitar
Running time	41 Min.	Nippy Blackford	Guitar
Label	Century Media	Bill Dozer	Bass
Release	22 September 2014	Dave Sherwood on Drums	Drums
Country	England	-	Keyboard
Producer	Jamie Elton
Similar artists	---

With its full length debut album, British unit Amulet is trying hard and is also in fact rather successful in its quest to sonically find an atmosphere deriving from around three decades ago, to a time when real heavy metal was really starting to get established around the world. This phenomenon doesn't necessarily make this effort something awesome or a mega achievement, since the songs' outcome is first and foremost what matters in terms of a great record.

If Amulet was from a different age, the band's music would probably land somewhere in the variety of bands in the early eighties that didn't quite make it, simply because they weren't good enough to compete with the giants, since their songs were of lower standards than what the more successful bands did come up with. Certainly this band is able to reactivate this distant period in metal, with both feelings of breathing metal until death and a decisive flow, yet at the same, it feels a little too ineffectual overall to fully satisfy my needs, desires and demands.

A lot of the material on this record is hailing from pretty much the same formula. The band definitely doesn't step away from its chosen course and in the end it turns out to a somewhat monotonous experience when you decide to listen to it again and again and again like I have done. Personally I feel that the riffs are somehow a little recognizable all throughout the record and Jamie Elton's vocals mostly end up in more or less the same tones, not harmonizing with what I'm looking for.

If you're into this type of retro metal and you feel that modernity isn't your thing, then it might be worth checking out this release as a complement to your old favorite bands. On the other hand, if you're fed up with bands trying to benefit from what was created by other musicians in the past, you're probably better off by leaving this album be.

Performance	Originality	Production	Vocals	Songwriting
6	3	5	5	4

Summary
4 chalices of 10 - Tobbe