Aftershok – Burning Chrome

AFTERSHOK
BURNING CHROME
Released 2004 (Auburn)

Track List:
01. Sons Of Thunder
02. Burning Chrome
03. Against The Rage
04. Dream Maker
05. Livin’ On The Redline
06. When Comes The Rain
07. Riot
08. Do You Believe?
09. Bombs Away!
10. The Gathering
11. Edge Of Tomorrow

Band Members:
Vic Hix – lead vocals
George Mihalovich – guitar and vocals
Nick G. – bass and vocals
George B. – drums and vocals

Production:
Studio engineer Lou Contumelio.
Mastering engineer Jim “Skippy” Pointkowski.

Review:
The mailman didn’t seem to like Aftershok, but after a few tries their second album finally fell onto my desk. And ya know, after all this waiting I can’t seem to decide if I like Burning Chrome or not. It seems I am doing a lot of flip-flopping between loving and hating this CD.

Musically the band is top notch. They call themselves classic metal, but they fit somewhere in that gray area that classic Riot fell into. It’s not really thrash, not really traditional metal and not really hard rock, yet it incorporates elements of each. Regardless of how you want to categorize Aftershok, I have no problems what-so-ever with what they deliver musically.

The problem I have is with vocalist Vic Hix, who is best known for his work with late 80s band Shok Paris. If you like Shok Paris you may as well disregard the next few comments and pick up Burning Chrome immediately. However for those of you that have never heard Vic Hix before let me give you an idea. He has a great guttural growl and a powerful mid-range (imagine Savatage meets WWIII), but he has a strange way of finishing off certain words. At the end of a lyrical line Vic will break words up (for lack of a better term). For example; ‘do’ becomes ‘do-oo’, ‘you’ becomes ‘yo-ou’, ”rage’ becomes ‘ra-age’, etc. At times it annoyed me to death.

But there is no denying the power of songs such as “Sons Of Thunder”, “Livin’ On The Redline”, “When Comes The Rain” (which has an intro reminiscent of Vandenberg‘s “Burning Heart”) and “Riot”. I’m going to ride the fence with this release and let you the listener determine for yourself whether this one is worthy for your collection.

www.aftershok.com – www.auburnrecords.com.

Reviewed by Skid for Sleaze Roxx, May 2006.

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