Overkill, Tora Tora, Herman Frank, Edge Of Paradise + More

There were a bunch of cool videos released at the tail end of last week, so instead of posting them during the weekend, I figured they could serve to help get the week started with these tracks.

Imonolith is a new band that is made of parts that center around the Strapping Young Lad/Fear Factory family tree.  When interviewing Gene Hoglan years ago, he told me that Strapping Young Lad was Devin Townsend’s attempt to do what Fear Factory was doing.

So it would be no surprise that SYL’s Byron Stroud would go on to play bass in Fear Factory, and now this project, Ryan Van Poederooyen was part of the latest incarnation of The Devin Townsend Project, he is on drums, guitarist Brian Waddell was also in the Devin Townsend Project, while the other guitarist, Kai Huppunen was most notably part of Methods Of Mayhem.

Lead singer Jon Howard was in Threat Signal and Arkaea, the band that featured former Fear Factory drummer Raymond Herrera and Christian Olde Wolbers.  The first track “Hollow” definitely sounds like a sum of all of their parts, taking their cues from all of the members’ previous bands.

Speaking of Fear Factory, DieKlute is a band that features Dino Cazares of Fear Factory, and the lead singer tandem of Jurgen Engler of Die Krupps, and Leæther Strip’s Clas Larsen. This sounds like classic German industrial hard rock in the vein of KMFDM, or tons of other material their label Cleopatra has previously released.

Edge Of Paradise is an L.A. band that is headed up by Margarita Monet, and Dave Bates. I’ve been lucky enough to interview Margarita in the past, and have always found things off of each of their releases that really like. “Face Of Fear” is the first taste of the music new music from the band, their new album Universe drops shortly.

Funny that with all of the attention Greta Van Fleet gets, people almost forget that Rival Sons has been doing the Zeppelin thing for years. Maybe not as obvious or pronounced for everyone, or maybe their pr machine isn’t as big?  But their new song, “Look Away” has Zeppelin III all over it. Not knocking it, because I think that when this band has been good, they’ve been great, and definitely deserve the notoriety in the states that they have in the U.K.

The Wings Of War will be out next month, but Overkill has decided to release another track off of the album to help get people pumped for the release. If the track “Head Of A Pin” doesn’t pump you up, you have no pulse!

Herman Frank has released another track off of his upcoming release Fear, this time around it’s for the title track, “Fear”. Really looking forward to the album’s release, everything I’ve heard off of it so far sounds great.

Beartooth is a band that has been getting plenty of modern hard rock press, although Caleb Shomo is probably best known for being a founder of the crabcore movement, those days along behind him.  This track is called “You Never Know” and it is just pure rock, it comes off of their last album, Disease, which came out last September.

Impellitteri’s The Nature Of The Beast was an album that almost made my best of 2018 list. It is a solid release that a lot of quality material. Here is a video for their cover of the Andrew Lloyd Webber classic, “Phantom Of The Opera”.

Bastards Of Beale is the new album by Tora Tora, can’t say I was a fan back in the day, but the two songs they have release sound great, so much so that I’m looking forward to checking out the entire album.

Helevorn is a doom metal band out of Spain that is about to tour North America, if you’re a fan of old-school Paradise Lost, this band is right up your alley, check out the track “A Sail To Sanity”.

Article by Victor M. Ruiz of Mars Attacks Radio & Podcast, and Galaxy Of Geeks Podcast.  Connect with him on Twitter:  @vmr907