If Blade Killer had been around in the 80s, Metallica would have been doing Garage Days covers of their stuff. Their sound owes everything to the first three Iron Maiden albums - - especially the first two. It’s a celebration and tribute to the guitar harmonies, bouncy Clive-Burr-esque drums, and the Punk-adjacent energy of those Maiden records, but it’s also it own thing, timely and relevant for 2018. Blade Killer’s retro attack keeps one eye on the rearview, and one eye on the road ahead.

We can make the Maiden comparisons all day, but the vocals echo respectable Punk/Hardcore acts like Social Distortion and Propaghandi. But this is not Punk.Their sophomore record, “High Risk,” is Traditional Metal purity; twenty-nine minutes of salted raw, blistering Rock n’ Roll. Eight tracks, not a single one over 5 minutes in length. No ballads, no Prog, no Jazz, no experimentation, just knuckle-to-tooth Hard Rock n’ Roll. Blast this to your non-Metal friends, just for the satisfaction of their grimacing faces, just to hear them call it noise.
Lyrically, Blade Killer are. . . what you’d expect from a band called Blade Killer: 10th grade notebook silliness about the devil and living fast tonight, living fast all right. But that’s OK; they deliver with the music, where it counts. Some bands you go to for depth, others you go to for visceral excitement. BK are the latter.
There’s not a bad tune on the record; the title track is good, “Endangered Dreams” is good, “In the Arms of the Devil” is great. The catchy chorus will stop you in your tracks, wherever you are, whatever you’re doing.