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Vicious Rumors: Celebration Decay

Thrash Power Metal

3.5/5.0

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SPV/Steamhammer
Words: Craig Hartranft
Added: 12.08.2020 | Released: 21.08.2020

Formed in the Bay Area better than 40 years ago by guitarist Geoff Thorpe, Vicious Rumors has been consistently releasing albums and touring in support of them all these years. Recently, the band celebrated the 30th anniversary of one their most popular albums, 1988's Digital Dictator. Vicious Rumors embarked on what they thought would be a short 20 gig tour. The trip morphed into more than one hundred shows. Invigorated by that experience, Thorpe and his band of merry musicians entered the studio for their latest and lucky thirteenth album, Celebration Decay. The album features new vocalist Nick Courtney.

Vicious Rumors

As most metalheads know, Vicious Rumors delivers a hybrid of tradition heavy metal, thrash metal, and American power metal. The typical Vicious Rumors song can be distilled to a simple formula. Begin with rabid riffs (and sometimes a brief solo) undergirded by a heavy, deliberate rhythm section, add speed, gallop, and some groove, and then move everything to the blistering solos. Above all this you have Nick Courtney and his assertive, grizzly, sometimes screamo vocals. The guy is definitely metal, but a bit to raw for me.

You'll hear this familiar Vicious Rumors metal recipe with Celebration Day, Pulse Of The Dead, or the fast, thrashy, and aptly titled Collision Course Disaster. Plenty of screaming guitar lines in that one. With Arrival Of Desolation and Death Eternal, you'll find Vicious Rumors putting more groove in their power metal gallop. Alternatively, not everything here is a horse race. Both Asylum Of Blood and Long Way Home have a heavy, plodding groove. Drop the tempo a little more and Vicious Rumors could invent a new genre, thrash doom metal. In something of a similar vein, there's Darkness Divine which begins with an interesting mix of acoustic and electric guitar, before turning into a heavy, plodding, and somewhat creepy metal song.

Taken as a whole, if you like anything that Vicious Rumors had done in the past, you will not be disappointed in the least with Celebration Decay. Straight up American thrash power metal.

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