Fischel's Beast
Commencement
Rating
Style: 80's (Speed) Metal
Release date: 2008
 

Fishel's Beast? Never heard about it before? Perhaps the band Sentinel Beast rings a bell! Somewhere in the mid 80's (1986) Sentinel Beast released their debut called 'Depths of Death'. Barry Fischel was the original founder and guitarist of this speed/thrash band. At that time they were rather promising. Together with int. al. Flotsam and Jetsam and Detente, they were on one of Brian Slagel's famous Metal Massacre records (MM. VII).

After wandering around our globe for some years, Barry found it time to finally record some songs that had already been written for what was meant to be Sentinel Beast's second album. Five songs are to be found on this CD. Eric Mouriello (bass), Ed Klinger (dr) and Anthony Cross (voc) complete the band. Besides that, Barry invited Chris Caffery to play solos on the songs "Forbidden Territories" and "Fate of Kings".

All five songs sound a little old-fashioned, you can hear that most of them have been written more than 20 years ago, even the production sounds old-school. Not that the production sucks, but you can hear that they wanted to create the 80's sound. The speed-metal (It is not thrash) is good stuff to listen to. The guitar solos are great and the song writing is rather o.k. I'm not so cheerful about Anthony Cross's vocal performance, after a while it gets a little boring. He is an average vocalist that sounds o.k. for this kind of metal, but his range is too medium and the aggressive parts are not  persuasive enough.

Not a bad effort, and if the next full-length record will get a more modern production and Anthony can work a bit more on his vocal performance the band has a future.


Tracklist
01. Commencement/Forbidden Territories
02. The Phoenix
03. One Man's Cry
04. Fate of Kings
05. Where Am I
Label: Cerberus Records
Provided by: Barry Fischel
Reviewed by: Reinier de Vries
Date: April 15th 2009
Website: www.myspace.com/fischelsbeast