Old Season – Beyond The Black – Album Review

Source // Old Season

When Beyond The Black began, we were young, excitable, full of wonder about what the world had to offer. When it ended, we were old vikings, we’d seen the world, conquered most of it, we’d had our share of knocks and bruises but we’d carried on.

This may seem dramatically exaggerated but Beyond The Black makes you want to don a helmet and run headlong into battle!

Irish heavy metal sextet Old Season have absolutely smashed it out of the park with Beyond The Black; an album that contains just over an hours worth of heavy metal magic. The riffs are relentless and the composition is complex and exciting, twisting and turning like an old country side lane that you should only really do 30mph down but you drive at 70mph (probably while listening to Beyond The Black!).

The storytelling narrative of Old Season’s lyrics is excellent and the band perform with unrelenting energy throughout with “Nevermore”, their rip-snorter of a 9 minute closing track, proving tighter than your grumpy grandparent that only gives you a fiver for your birthday.

Old Season have a great way of guiding you through rhythmic shifts and blistering solos and “Scavenger” – the first single taken from Beyond The Black – teams with energy and makes us want to go and mosh; mosh ’til the break of dawn and then some! It’s playful, its lively and there’s even the odd bit of falsetto to get excited about (maybe that’s just us!) and you can’t get better than that. 7/10

Beyond The Black will be released on May 19th, 2017.

LINE-UP:
John Bonham – vocals
Jimmy Blanchfield – guitars
Jimmy Kiernan – guitars
Dave Copley – bass
Anto Walsh – drums
Dermod Smyth – keyboards, piano