LEVEL FIELDS - 1104
8 songs
47:06 minutes
***** ****
Pure Steel
Bandpage
Every musical genre has some vocalists that not only have regular voices, but Voices with a capital V. In the hard rock and heavy metal genre, one might think of the late Ronnie James Dio, Bruce Dickinson and Rob Halford, but there are some that may not have achieved that same level of success but still have a Voice that is immediately recognisable and incredibly insane. Let’s talk for instance about Alan Tecchio who helped define the progressive metal genre in the Eighties by being a member of Hades and Watchtower. In the Nineties he turned his attention to more groove-oriented metal with Non-Fiction, and since then has spent this millennium lending his vocal talent to Autumn Hour and Mike LePond’s Silent Assassins.
And now he is back as the vocalist of yet another band called Level Fields, consisting of him and Autumn Hour bassist Clint Arent on the American side, and guitarist Marco Ahrens and drummer Andreas Tegeler on the German side. Both are founding members of progressive metal band Poverty’s No Crime who started in the early Nineties, with Tegeler also currently playing in Bleeding and Life Artist.
The band calls its music for obvious reasons transatlantic metal, but if you want to describe it in a less geographic and more stylistic way, you might call it doom influenced heavy metal with trace amounts of prog, groove and thrash metal. Or let’s say Level Fields sound closer to Non-Fiction than to Watchtower. Those who are familiar with the vocal capacities of Alan Tecchio know that he can succeed in any genre, and Level Fields is no different. Although I assume that the musicians rarely if ever meet in person, the generally long songs on their debut album 1104 are full of great songwriting ideas. The opener Disowned is a complex piece full of different parts that make it up to seven minutes. Especially on the one-word chorus, Tecchio shows that his voice can still reach this impossible heights thirty years after his phenomenal time in Hades and Watchtower. Truth Bringer is a groovier track that is more concise and once again takes all its momentum from the fantastic vocalist. Occasional organ parts give the songs a certain Seventies aura, as if the ghosts of Deep Purple and Uriah Heep are watching over the musicians. Enough is a moodier track that also doesn’t neglect its groovy component. Get Over Is is a ballad with mandolin intro which recalls the early Led Zeppelin.
The album’s second half is just as good as its first one. Womb To Tomb is yet another typical groove rocker, before Growing Old, at nearly eight minutes, is an introspective doom track which deals with the undeniable fact of getting older and one’s own mortality. It’s a really strong piece, and so unlike the first single ReMarquezAble, a two-and-a-half-minute speed rock song about a MotoGP champion that sounds somehow like a tribute to Deep Purple Speed King. The album concludes with the seven-and-a-half-minute long title track Extra 1104, a song about the 1925 Rockport train wreck where dozens of German immigrants to the USA died. This track is possibly another hint at the transatlantic nature of this project and also a damn good rocking metal song with some weird electric components that prove that Level Fields are open to all kinds of ideas.
Consisting of experienced musicians, it would still be wrong to call Level Fields an all-star band, and yet their debut album 1104 has enough virtues to make it one of the most interesting metal records of the year. As much as it is a pleasure to hear the great voice of Alan Tecchio again, it also must be said that the musicians are without an exception doing an excellent job. Fans of timeless metal will salivate at the prospect of listening to 1104.