Blackstar
Barbed Wire Soul

Review conceived and structured by De…Marga…

We are at the end of September 1997 when a new musical entity makes its recording debut. Blackstar is the simple and somehow unsettling name chosen by the four guys that form this English lineup. A new project, but realized by old and experienced acquaintances, people who still hold a place of honor in the historical chronology of heavy music.

Barbed Wire Soul has its roots in 1996, when Carcass released Swansong, the true swan song of the English band, which just a few months later would put an end to the first part of their huge career. The band's last album represents a further transformation, another unexpected change of course: they choose to almost completely abandon death metal, rewriting their musical approach entirely, which becomes purely hard’n’heavy.

From this hard turn—which looks back to the past and in particular the seventies—Blackstar is shaped by Jeff Walker, Ken Owen, and Carlo Regadas, already members of the last "Carcassian" incarnation. Unfortunately, Bill Steer prefers to say farewell to the company (while remaining on excellent terms with his former colleagues) to form the Firebird, also immersed in hard rock sounds of "seventies" memory. In his place, they decide to recruit another sacred monster of the six strings, that Mark Griffiths, already a bassist in the early works of Cathedral.

A flaming black star is the central element of the cover: an all-too-clear symbol to define the sound blend that makes up the eleven tracks of the album. A sequence of incendiary tracks, which rest on Carlo's sinuous guitar riffs, well supported by the less flashy but equally vigorous work of Mark. And it is precisely to the sound of Cathedral, the heavier ones of albums like The Ethereal Mirror, that the entire Blackstar album refers. On this occasion, Walker partially cleans up his vocal timbre—shifting from growl to raw vocals—while Owen completely forgets the tombal and butchering hysteria of Reek of Putrefaction or Symphonies of Sickness, and decides to interpret the album by beating rhythms divided between mid and up tempos, entering a more hard rock sound mentality. This is why, despite the extreme past of the musicians, Blackstar becomes more accessible and melodic.

Who could, in fact, resist the sparkling heavy’n’roll of New Song, or the aggressive and raw Sound of Silence (stunning guitar solos), or even the fiery hard’n’heavy of Smile, which for both voice and music clearly recalls the more classic metal works of the "Cathedral." It is up to Rock’n’Roll Circus and Waste of Space to take on the role of hits of the album: they succeed excellently by alternating potent mid-tempos with incandescent gallops, blissfully contaminated with sax and keyboard inserts (masterfully produced by Colin Richardson). Also worthy of note is the anthem Revolution of the Heart, which probably reflects Walker's social and political ideology.

In conclusion, a compact, aggressive, rough, and smooth album that shows us a band in search of rebirth, or rather a new raw reality on which to musically indulge. And it must be admitted that this transition from the slaughter to hell has been fully successful. Of course, commercially speaking, Barbed Wire Soul remains a minor product compared to the material proposed by the bands from which the musicians originated; but it is still a work aimed at involving a wider circle of people, namely every respectable lover of rock, understood in its rawest and most monolithic form. A solid four stars!

De…Marga…& Dragonstar