Harmonic metal. If there isn't a genre for this - although one might suppose metalcore is close enough - then there should be, and Orange County quintet Eighteen Visions will be its standard bearer.

As rock records go, it's got all the ingredients you'd expect of today's modern metal outfit: blistering, chundering guitars, pounding bass, squawked vocals and driving drums. Imagine Guns 'N Roses meets HIM and voila, you've got it.

This album's redeeming feature is that it harks back - or towards, or across, or whatever - to a grinding rock sound that seems to have gone out of commercial fashion. Its influences certainly veer towards a more European metal sound; Rammstein, Tony Iommi, even the mighty Iron Maiden, rather than the current vogue for US alt rock acts to toy with punk, which only the likes of Green Day can (barely) get away with.

As with all great bombastic rock albums, Eighteen Visions is wonderfully pompous at times. Truth Or Consequence is the boys clearly having a try at early Sabbath, while Coma and The Sweetest Memory are Def Leppard taken off to a tee.

There's precious little humour here, just full-on metalcore cliché after cliché. But frankly who cares? Originality in rock is so difficult to find these days, but when it is parodied with such naive but well-meant gusto and enthusiasm it is hard to be too critical.

Rating:
Released: 4th September 2006
Label: Columbia