CD Review
Artist:  Black Tide
Album Title:  Light From Above
Label:  Interscope Records
Released:  March 11, 2006 

3 ½ Stars

Reviewed by: Todd Andre (Calgary Correspondent - Canada) 

Is anything 'new' untouched by retro anymore?  The heavy metal genre has slipped out of the self parody of acts like The Darkness and into the glorification of its own history.  Black Tide's Light From Above is an unselfconscious collage of thrash metal, hair metal and hair styles from Satan's favourite hell raisin' decade of the 1980s.  By serendipity or by design, however, not one member of the band was out of his terrible twos before the ‘80s came to a close.  Still they have managed to capture the sound and feel of the metal movement without sounding too stale and overdone.  Let me put it this way: nobody in this band is wearing a bumble bee costume (remember W.A.S.P.?).

For better or worse, though, feature tracks like their power ballad "Warriors of Time" wade in the same shallow lyrical depth as their legendary predecessors Motley Crue, Judas Priest and Iron Maiden.  The template has failed to go away, because the template has never failed to satisfy metalheads across the globe. Lead singer Gabriel 'Weeman' Garcia  -- still waiting for his next birthday to become eligible for a US drivers license -- manages to prove that lyrics are still secondary to the wailing guitar solos in metal, as the entire track revolve around the chorus "We are the Warriors of Time" alongside the tribal chanting of "whoa-ohhh-ahhh-ohhhs."  The lead single "Shockwave" has more in the way of verses, as Garcia belts out classics like "a shockwave came to open up your eyes / you're feeling down there's no big surprise /what if you try to scream louder as you can / show me you're a man."  The lyrical content of the album is what you would expect from a group of young boys trying to show us that they are men.  They aren't the first group of teenage boys to do this by screaming.

If the weakness of this album is in its lyrics, its strength lies in its potential.  Admittedly, I am a recovering metalhead throwback from the late 90s, and some of the stuff on this album reminds me of late 80s Alice in Chains.  Alice in Chains was too late to catch the thrash/glam/hair metal wave, and you would think that Black Tide has missed the boat entirely.  This doesn't seem to be the case.  They fit the 'retromania' spirit of the times alongside the various new wave revivals we are beginning to see pop up everywhere.  At their worst, these guys are excellent at replicating the best grinding guitar riffs and pounding drums of their 80s predecessors.  We see this in the Motley Crue style "Live Fast and Die Young" or the Metallica cover "Hit the Lights."  At their best they re-legitimate a sound that had been declared dead by grunge a generation before.  Their mosh pit inspired videos reappropriate metal back into youth culture from the vanquished generation of thirty-something metalheads summed up in the pathetic depiction of Terry and Dean in Michael Dowse's 2002 mockumentary Fubar. 

Is this the second coming of Metallica?  Or is it just plain plagiarism, a blatant violation of intellectual property rights?  I think that for the metalheads out there -- or the metalhead in you -- Black Tide is the future of metal.  Let's hope Lars Ulrich leaves the kids alone.

1. Shockwave-3:39
2. Shout-3:27
3. Warriors of Time-5:54
4. Give Me a Chance-3:36
5. Let Me-3:31
6. Show Me The Way-4:00
7. Enterprise-4:32
8. Live Fast Die Young-3:02
9. Hit The Lights-3:43
10. Black Abyss-4:07
11. Light From Above-5:45