Review: 2011 Metal Blade Sampler

Well first of all, this album is free, so there is no reason not to get it. If you don’t like the album, you just don’t listen to it again. Metal Blade records, that record label that puts this out has been around forever. One of my favorite albums is Voivod’s War and Pain. My older brother had it when I was a little kid, that was actually the same Metal Blade records.
The band Pentagram on this sampler, they date back even further then Voivod- they existed in the 70’s but didn’t put out a full length album until the 80’s. Ho far back? 1971 Pentagram existed, and if you want to make the claim that they where way ahead of their time- they sound suspiciously a lot like Black Sabbath who were big at the time. They sound more or less the same as they did in the 80’s. Actually there are recordings of the 70’s Pentagram spin off band Bedemon floating around, sounds more or less the same as they do now. Those guys have been doing the same thing for forty years.
Sister is a new band but they sound like they just stepped out of the 80’s- but they feel like they stepped out of 80’s hair metal which I’m not nearly as warm on. The band Portrait on here also sound like they stepped out of the 80’s, but are closer to N.W.O.B.H.M (New Wave of British Heavy Metal) era stuff. They are Swedish. They at least decided to imitate decent-good range 80’s music. Its not until a track by the death metal band Hate Eternal out of Florida do we get a sense that this is a sampler from the label that once put out War and Pain which is more or less a wall of noise. Ipsissimus serve up some standard black metal.
Hey, the label has been around long enough to put out the first Voivod, and the album is free, how much can you expect. That band Primordial have a track on it, a kind of lengthy doom metal power balled with operatic 80’s metal vocals. In fact a lot of the album sounds as though the 90’s haven’t come yet, more or less. Doom metal, black metal, and death metal all existed back then. That’s fine, I like 80’s metal. I won’t lie and say this is a radical and revolutionary album, but I could see throwing the sampler on when something else was going on. There’s a track by a band called Across the Sun that has some very odd synths and very odd song structure, but the collection is mostly very traditional metal. Actually, if you went back and put on War and Pain at a party or something it would likely sound more contemporary then the 2011 Metal Blade Sampler.
Hey, the album is free and the label has been around forever. What are you going to do? Even though this album finishes dead last of metal albums I’ve reviewed this week (Velimor, In Silentio Noctis, Bathory and Candlemass) it isn’t the worst album I’ve ever heard or anything, and it is free. I do, however, regret having given In Silentio Noctis a mediocre review because in comparison to Metal Blade Sampler 2011 In Silentio Noctis sound revolutionary.