What a riotously enjoyable, unique, stormingly brilliant album. I’ve been thinking about this quite a bit recently, and I’ve concluded that, for reasons I will reveal over the course of this review, Phantom Spell might just be the best heavy metal band currently doing the rounds.

I say ‘band’, but everything on H&H is recorded, played and sung by Kyle McNeill, he of the tastefully flying fingers and supremely unique vocalisational skills. He’s no mean drummer or keyboardist either, with the result being another splendid exercise in heavy metal that is at once firmly rooted in the classics whilst always sounding fresh and alive.

It’s a really heady mix, and, similarly to the band’s last album Immortal’s Requiem, there is not one note wasted in McNeill’s quest to bring absolutely the best music he can to the table. This is ‘proper’ music in every sense – music that not only satisfies the writers urge to create, but also the listener’s urge to, well… listen. You can’t help but get swept up in the glorious majesty of tracks like A Distant Shore, which merges the frigid musicality of seventies prog with the blood and thunder muscle and might of eighties metal with deathless precision; every phrase is manipulated to achieve maximum impact, but it’s done in such a way that, even if you are not familiar with the source material, you’ll still be blown away by the glorious noise that’s battering your ears at any given point on the record. Heavy metal is rarely as just downright enjoyable as this these days; McNeill has captured the spirit, the fire, the verve and the ideal of ‘our kind of music’ in this album’s forty minutes that I genuinely in’t believe, and I love him for it.

Seriously – in a year that’s already thrown up more than it’s fair share of top notch heavy metal thunder, this could end up being the best of the lot, When the time comes, you must feast your ears on it’s majesty…

Heather & Hearth releases on July 18th.