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Freedoms Reign is the brainchild of ex-Fates Warning guitar player/singer Victor Arduini. The band was born out of Arduini's fervent desire to play melodic power/heavy metal again after 26 years of silence.

After 7 recordings, a live dvd and some live recordings it’s time for a best of from Freedom Call’s best songs they made in fifteen years This album got the name Ages of Light. The band around Chris Bay toured a lot with bands like Edguy, Blind Guardian and Hammerfall.

While the melodies presented on Desperate Souls aren't groundbreaking for the genre, they are quite good and will certainly appeal to fans of doom metal bands such as Solitude Aeturnus, Trouble, Candlemass, Desolation Angels and Wall Of Sleep.

The first time we’ve heard from this band, A Pale Horse Named Death, was in 2011. Former drummer of Type O Negative, Life Of Agony, Sal Abruscato started this band. He has been hiding three things for us a long time; that he can play guitar, that he’s a pretty good vocalist and that he can write songs.

Sal Abruscato and Matt Brown have followed 2011’s incredible introduction, which keeps the band’s patented signature formula of slow, deliberate sludge and head- down doom in tact.

Valient Thorr come from North Carolina and were founded in 2000. Although they had been very busy and Our Own Masters is already their sixth album, I wasn't familiar with their music so far. But listening to the twelve songs on the new record has been a positive experience. Valient Thorr are a punk'n'metal band that sounds like a crossbreed of Zen Guerilla, Baroness and Pennywise The melodic component plays an important role in most Thorr's songs.

When I started reading the info on this band, I was thinking this might just be another band fishing in the same pond.  By which I mean it could have been another copycat of bands like Nightwish, Epica or one of those other bands in the symphonic – progressive – traditional – power metal genre.

Nocturne hail from Chicago, Illinois, U.S. of A., and it is a solo-project by Dan Klein, who did record everything, instruments and vocals. The debut is called Ave Noctem and lasts for forty five minutes.

King Parrot is a thrash and grind metal band from Australia and was formed by three ex-members of “Watchdog Discipline” (White, Lacey and Rizzo) plus Young from Stiff Meat and Cockfight Shootout bassist Slattz. The band fired off an EP in short order and quickly became firmly established as an energetic and punishing live force.

Jeff Lynne is best known for his work with Electric Light Orchestra, shortened ELO.  But he has also done some solo work, and this is where ‘Armchair Theatre’ comes from.  This Frontiers release actually is a re-release of an album that has been out of print for a decade or so.  Frontiers have added two previously unreleased tracks however.

I Klatus is an interesting concept. Essentially the brainchild of one man known as guitarist/vocalist/visual artist Tom Denny with enlisted help from various guest musicians all over the Chicago doom scene such as Chris Wozniak (Lair of the Minotaur, Earthen Grave), John Bomher (Yakuza, Indian) Leon del Muerte (Intronaut), Bruce Lamont (Yakuza) and others, the band's output must be heard to really be understood.