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By RYAN MAVITY
We live in the age of the reunion. In the music scene alone, we’ve had the recent returns of Bruce Dickinson and Iron Maiden, Rob Halford and Judas Priest, Dave Lombardo with Slayer, Motley Crue with each other and The Killers with obscurity. In this age of divorce, it’s almost inevitable that after the band gets successful and breaks up they will have a resurgence of popularity, a “Behind the Music” episode, get thrown a ton of money and, of course, have the music equivalent of makeup sex, the reunion tour.
With that said, what somehow slipped through the cracks, for me at least, was the reunion of ’80s thrash band Metal Church. Their first incarnation formed in 1981 and after breaking up in 1993, they reformed and have been together since 1998. At this point, the band only has one original member left, but damn it, Metal Church must go on! And so they have, with a new album, A Light in the Dark, dedicated to recently deceased former vocalist David Wayne.
My earlier sarcasm may give you the impression that I didn’t like this band or this album, and truth be told it never rises above mediocrity, but still, I’ll be damned if I didn’t enjoy it at least a little bit. Pretty much taking their cues, if not downright sounding like a tribute band, from Iron Maiden and Judas Priest, A Light in the Dark is the kind of music that was quaint back in 1989. I kept waiting for them to bust out “Fear of the Dark” or “Turbo Lover.” Then again, there are hundreds of worse bands one could sound like than Maiden or Priest (Creed or Limp Bizkit, for example). Screeching vocals, power chords, and pounding drums—all of metal’s cliched ingredients are here. It’s almost as if the band was preserved in ice in 1993 and recently thawed out when it became OK for people to produce this kind of music again. Still, part of the charm of the band is in the way they are so unapologetically old school.
While the album plays like an anthology of metal’s distant past, there are some good moments. The title track is a solid leadoff, with vocalist Ronny Munroe doing his best impression of THE Bruce Dickinson without the cowbell or penchant for swordfighting. “Beyond All Reason” comes off like an outtake from the Kill Em All sessions crossed with something from Number of the Beast. “Mirror of Lies” is the sort of track that makes you drive your car at high speeds. “The Believer” brings a nice air of doom and menace. “Son of the Son” may be the album’s best track, a power ballad dirge that manages to be both cool and ridiculous at the same time.
But it’s hard to shake the feeling that we’ve heard this album before. There’s nothing that separates Metal Church from their influences or their more successful contemporaries like Metallica, Anthrax, or Megadeth. It’s a strange album in that it’s too unoriginal to recommend, but it’s also courageous in it’s refusal to alter the traditional metal sound that got the band a following in the first place. It’s the sort of album that won’t stick in your CD player for a long time but you won’t use it as a beverage coaster either.
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