Fire Assassins  - Soul Taker

The world of rock music is certainly no stranger to the idea that profundity and absurdity need not always be mutually exclusive; after all, many classic albums are built upon an oddly transfixing mixture of the bizarre and the sublime, most early heavy metal albums and pretty much the entire progressive rock canon being examples of this. So let’s be clear. ‘Soul Taker,’ the debut album of midlands duo Fire Assassins, may well be more of a ‘Hammer House Of Horror’ than a ‘Texas Chainsaw Massacre’, but this isn’t immediately to its detriment... the dodgy Satanic voiceovers and B-Movie Narrative (that’s not a backhanded insult by the way, as this correspondent happens to love B-movies) do take some getting used to, and suspending your disbelief for the duration of the album’s hour-odd running time is advisable to get the most out of this record, but to discount it purely on its fantastic aesthetic would be unfair as there’s a lot to enjoy here musically, galloping maiden-esque riffs from multi instrumentalist Girish Patel and overblown, dramatic vocals from Stefan Hemming combining to create an enjoyably authentic classic metal

What does put something of a cap on the fun though is the album’s emphasis on story over music, the feeling that these songs are constructed in service to the narrative and not vice versa... some of these tracks venture into the eight or nine minute zone, and there doesn’t seem to be enough lyrical or musical variation to justify such length. ‘Soul Taker’ has evidently been a labour of love for Patel and Hemming and they can be justifiably proud of what they have achieved, but a casual listener is going to be hard pressed to get through the whole thing in one sitting, as it was intended to be heard. More rigorous quality control, as well as some overall trimming of runtimes, could make ‘Soul Taker’s successor a trad metal gem.