I first became aware of Oregon’s Sylent Storm a couple of years back when my colleague Ferry Templeton featured them in his must-read Crusade of Power column; To say I loved their traditional American power/heavy metal mashup from the get-go would be an understatement! So, imagine the thrills when Sentinel Daily editor Scott Adams asked me to review their debut full-length record, The Fire Never Dies!

Essentially TFND finds the band ploughing the same furrow as their self-titled EP from 2018; they even throw in a reprise of that record’s Patriots of Metal on the new release (as well as a few other tracks), which is a handy barometer with which to test how far, if at all, the band has strayed (or progressed!) from their original template.

The answer to that question is easy to answer; Sylent Storm remain committed to the founding principles of heavy metal as it should be played, and Patriots of Metal is still a great song, but in all other respects you can virtually taste the development evident in tracks like Wrath of the Blade or the raging radio metal of Beware The BloodMoon… these sons of Oregon are still here to bang some heads, no doubt about it, but that last-named track in particular shows them to be signally unafraid of injecting a little melody to the mayhem. Dokken meets mid eighties Judas Priest? I’ll take that!

The two instrumentals found on the disc prove guitarist Michael Ian Brisbane to be a player of taste and skill (also see his acoustic work on the delicate ballad Sleeping In The Rain for extra proof) but for the most part I’m sure you’ll be pleased to hear that it’s still metal business as usual for Sylent Storm. And when that business involves blazing metal of the calibre of Betrayal (also found on that EP) then who are we to complain?

The Fire Never Dies releases on November 27th.