During my teens I spent most of my time listening to bands like Metallica, Megadeth and Iron Maiden. Fast and heavily rhythmic guitar work with shredding solos. Any band that I’ve heard since just get compared to those ones cause they were what brought me to the dance. Having said that, the guitar playing on Darker Half’s new album Never Surrender is just as good, if not better, than any of the aforementioned bands at any stage of their career. Melody, hooks and good old fashion creativity result in some great song-writing where you can’t help but appreciate the hard work the band has put in to get to the level they’re at to write and play songs like these.

 

Personally, I’ll always prefer vocals in the style of Bruce Dickenson, Geoff Tate or Rob Helford to guttural screams so it was with great pleasure that when I discovered Darker Half I was greeted with a ‘singer’, and a damn good one at that. Vo Simpson not only handles vocal duties but also guitar. The band is rounded out with Brad Dickson on guitar, Simon Hamilton on bass and backing vocals and Dominic Simpson on drums and backing vocals.

 

The album opener Nemesis gets right down to it with intricate riffing, dexterous solos, and raw energy. The harmonised melodies in tracks like Never Surrender and Blinded By Darkness are nothing but impressive and the guitar tone on these tracks and throughout the album is amazing. There’s a fantastic clarity in the notes that doesn’t sacrifice the harsh metal edge.

 

Heads Are Gonna Roll is a stand out fast paced track that takes some Dream Theater influences and has some old school thrash lyrics delivered in a power metal type style. There’s a killer breakdown instrumental section and last two minutes of this one is just pure brilliance.

The first video from the album, End of the Line, has some great song writing in terms of lyrics, as does Anthem for Doomed Youth which as the title suggests tackles some important issues. It has some really cool riffs too.

 

Darker Half are from Sydney Australia and have opened for bands such as Queensryche, Edguy, Children of Bodom, Nightwish and Accept, among many others. It would be easy to label them as thrash, but tracks like Stranger and As Darkness Fades are in more of a moderate tempo, rather than cracking tempos in excess of 160 bpm. A more fitting description would be ‘melodic’ with thrash influences, for there are indeed elements of thrash included in their style such as double bass drumming and sixteenth note chugging riffs, but the band never seems constricted into a need to write to serve these traits.

 

Never Surrender is released through Rockstar Records.

More information on Darker Half can be found at the following sites.

 

https://www.facebook.com/darkerhalf

www.darkerhalf.com

 

 

Darker Half – End of the Line