Ignitor
Road Of Bones
4.2
Do you like rice? Do you like plain white rice with nothing on it? Would you eat it as the main course? If you've said yes to all three quesitons, boy do I have the album for you.
Ignitor are a female fronted traditional heavy metal band. Not knowing anything about the band before hand I hoped to pick up something akin to Warlock, or maybe even Hellion. Actually, the first thing that caught my eye was that the album was released on Italian label, Cruz Del Sur who have a strong track record with releases from Slough Feg, Pharaoh, Crescent Shield, and Hammers of Misfortune. It's unfortunate that the eye doesn't do the listening as I'm finding myself to be quite disappointed with this Texas band's sophomore release. Well, maybe disappointed is the wrong word, bored would probably be the most accurate word in the dictionary for what I'm hearing as I type this.
As mentioned earlier, Ignitor play traditional heavy metal, very straightforward stuff which, in itself, is not a bad thing, it's not as if Judas Priest have written the most technical music known to man. The problem is that Priest have, in some way, figured out how to inject their music with enough spice and enough life, that even the simplest idea comes across as interesting and inspiring, yet with Ignitor things just come off as by the numbers, bland, and simply put, boring. It actually took me about four different sittings to finally make it through the entire album as I found I couldn't listen to more than two songs before skipping around to try and find something interesting.
The opening riff to "Secret Enigma" needs attitude, it needs balls, and it sounds so flimsy when put in Ignitor's incapable hands. Don't get me wrong, it has nothing to do with superficial things, such as which chromosomes the band members have, the male members of the band don't exactly hold their weight either, with guitar player Batlord throwing out some undeniably vapid guitar solos and drummer Pat Doyle's incredibly tame performance. On the album you'll find lame attempts at rousing metal anthems like "Reinheitsgebot" (a tribute to Germany) or "March to the Guillotine" which even fails at eliciting much of a reaction during its chanting chorus, where singer Erika Swinnich actually busts out some impressive notes and sounds like she means it for once. "Hymn of Erin" has probably the strongest riff on the album, yet the surroundings let it down, the vocal melody just being too bland and awkward while the drums fail to back anything up but with a simple one-two beat that could at least use a little energy.
Ignitor simple don't have "it". They lack any sort of passion or feeling or anything that resembles a human being playing music that means something to them. Maybe one day they'll at least start sounding like they care, but for now they don't and why should the listener care if the band doesn't?
