The only real difference between old school metal in the eighties and now is that in the eighties you only reached as many people as you could physically send a tape to whereas now you can reach an audience instantly. The trick, of course, is that, with so many bands vying for a limited pool of listeners, you have to really stand out from the crowd (or just happen to get to the right people at the right time) or get lost forever in the undulating seas of unsigned music.
One such band is Southern, a band who, despite forming in 2012, seem to think that it’s actually 1982. Recorded, it seems, on a tape recorder, the band have a surprisingly clear, if lo-fi sound, and bands like Angel Witch, Judas Priest and early Iron Maiden all come rapidly to mind. It’s the sort of thing that possibly shouldn’t stand out, but it does because it sounds so different form the average over-produced work we get and it actually sounds incredibly authentic. It helps too that Southern’s songs (or at least the three on offer here) are pretty good and the musicianship is, for the most part excellent. Hailing from Brazil, Southern actually do NWOBHM better than any British band treading the boards, and there is no mistaking the unmistakable whiff of leather and ambition hanging in the air as you listen to ‘midnight wild’, a juddering heavy metal album that feels like it should soundtrack the closing credits of The Lost Boys. That Iron Maiden influence gets turned up to 11 on the vaguely daft ‘rock the night ‘till I die’ upon which Flavio Cavilha gets to unleash his best banshee wail. It’s a little rough and ready, and the drums particularly lose clarity as a result of the low-budget recording, but the quality of the band’s composition nonetheless shines through. The demo finishes with ‘runaway’, a raucous number that recalls the youthful thrashings of Metallica’s hit the lights’. It’s an impressive and fun conclusion to the demo and it points the way to better things for the band in the future.
Overall Southern are offering little that is new, and it’s fairly clear from their presentation that they have little interest in so doing. Nonetheless they prove remarkably infectious with their enthusiasm and, if you’re a metal fan, it’s impossible not to enjoy this three track offering as the band tear away at the tracks with unmistakable passion. More to the point, by virtue of going back to basics, the band sound refreshingly different from most other acts out there and it’s well worth checking the demo out on Soundcloud (see here) if you dig your metal loud, proud and irony free.
