I have had a really good vacation for the last 3 weeks and now I have to turn my business back to Metalrage. The first band of the list is Animal, a heavy metal band starring Randy Piper. Well, I guess the younger readers won’t know this guy, and I myself was really having a hard time remembering. Okay, Randy Piper started out with W.A.S.P, which was a very controversive heavy metal band back in the eighties. He also played a role in the well known act of Alice Cooper. Well, no more W.A.S.P. but we still have Randy Piper, who started out this band. The album is entitled  Violent New Breed and the biography delivered with the promo promised a lot, well I’m curious.

 

The album starts out with ‘Violent New Breed’, a standard heavy metal song with interesting vocals, nice guitar trickery and really heavy and pumping drums. I liked it instantly, but it doesn’t give me a boner. Of course there are many references to W.A.S.P. in the music, but also some nice influences from Helloween and Hammerfall. The next track called ‘Morning After’ is somewhat softer, but still it’s a nice ‘headnodding’ song. The production sounds very nice and I would almost say that Animal is a new-breed W.A.S.P, like the sound of the 21^st century with the old school feeling of british heavy metal. Well, I can’t deny that this album sounds very decent and all, but after 5 tracks I became a little bit bored. I really enjoy listening to Iron Maiden and so, but this tends to get a little bit annoying.