Early Man
Closing In

Like in a Chuck Palahniuk story, two boys raised in Columbus, Ohio are caught drinking industrial quantities of beer and smashing amplifiers in the garage under their house. Expelled by their families for treason against the Pentecostal church and ostracized by friends, they escape to New York where they form a band whose elementary sound reconnects to the pure style of METAL, before this genre was split into 50 different mini-categories. Thus, in a handful of initial minutes - the intoxicating attack of "Four Walls", pure NWOBHM school - Early Man reveal their intentions with a sparkling demonstration of talent.

I can already imagine them: Mike Conte (voice and guitar) banging on a '73 Gibson Sg trying to melt the natural distortions of Marshall and Peavey amplifiers while his partner Adam Bennati slams the skins behind a 500-pound drum set, unable to produce different tempos from the only two he learned: Sabbath-time and Maiden-time. Anachronistically stunning, raw, straightforward, and genuine, "Closing In" is a black cloud of metallic riffs and refrains mixed with a heavy and wooden groove that doesn't stop pounding from the first to the last second of each track. A bomb of a record. Just because it manages to crazily blend the leftovers from bands like Judas Priest, Celtic Frost, Black Sabbath, Iron Maiden, Mercyful Fate, Metallica, Minor Threat, Diamond Head, and Motorhead.

How these two guys managed to assemble all this while maintaining their own identity/personality without slipping into banal recycling is a mystery to me and probably the reason I fell in love with them. Certainly, many will look at Early Man with justified skepticism: Metal has moved forward and evolved, and time is a damned killer! But listening to "Closing In" is an exhilarating experience also because it gives a genuine, simple nostalgia for "what once was" and at the same time renews the unconditional love for this music that is old, new, futuristic, and... hard to die! Now, where did I put my copy of "No Sleep 'till Hammersmith"?