Album Review: Maid of Ace - “Live Fast Or Die”

 

Sometimes it takes a band going on hiatus for a bit to make you realise how much you miss them when they’re not about and such is the case with Hastings punk-metallers Maid of Ace. With two good albums (2014's self-titled album and 2016's Maid In England) under their belt, the band announced they were going on a temporary hiatus a few years back but have reunited this year to bring us their third album and right from the moment opener Let's Go kicks in with a force ten gale "OI! OI! OI! OI!" chant, you can tell we're in for a good one here.

Basically, Live Fast Or Die is pretty much a straight continuation of the first two Maid of Ace albums - songs like the title track hit you like a concrete boxing glove to the jaw and the heaviness doesn't drop off at all. Oh sure, songs like This Is War might be a little bit longer than yer average MOA tune and Repent may have a sinister whispered intro but they're still ferociously heavy with rabid vocals, razor-sharp guitars and pounding drums with the band sounding supremely tight.

Live Fast Or Die is definitely one of the most ferociously angry albums I've heard this year and it's perhaps no coincidence that the highlights here come with tracks like The Terror and Energy (which has an intro sounding oddly like Sepultura covering Judas Priest's Breaking The Law) where the band well and truly pile in with all the force of a tornado leaving you needing to catch your breath afterwards. It's only on Forever that they drop the tempo slightly to reflect the more thoughtful doomy lyrics but even here they still pack the sort of bite that'd have most of their contemporaries running for the hills.

All in all, Live Fast Or Die really does mark Maid of Ace out as one of the best punk bands in Britain today. Brutally heavy but with enough of an ear for melody to prevent their material from drifting into unlistenability this is a great album. Highly recommended - stream or download from the Maid of Ace Bandcamp page pronto if you know what's good for you.

NITE SONGS RATING: 🌕🌕🌕🌕🌕🌕🌕🌕🌕🌑 (9/10)

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A brief return from the dead...

Image
  Yup, we're back. Don't all get excited at once. I’d been toying with the idea of doing an end of year list again this year and after a lot of umming and aahing eventually decided to go for it. As with last year, inevitably there were bumps along the way. As of the start of December, I thought this list would be around 40 albums but inevitably reading other people’s lists pointed me towards a bunch of stuff that had passed me by earlier in the year. Plus of course there’s always a few teasing buggers who put stuff out at the last possible moment. So 40 became 50 which became 60 which finally became 70. You lucky people. Actually though, reading through this list, the main thing that strikes me is that I think this might be the most musically varied end of year list that Nite Songs has ever done. From gentle acoustics through acclaimed indie veterans to punk thrash and good old fashioned scuzzy rock ‘n’ roll via some decidedly unexpected diversions (industrial folk music? Check...
Read more

Garbage Days Revisited #90: Soho Roses - "The Third And Final Insult" (1989)

Image
  "If you won't love me then I'll find someone who will!"  - Soho Roses  - So Alone The Soho Roses were a classic case of right band, wrong time. If they'd broken on to the scene in the last few years then they'd have had a ready made audience on the 21st century power pop scene and probably be regulars at Some Weird Sin and similar club nights in the Smoke. The reality? They broke through towards the tail end of the '80s and got lumped in with the dying embers of the Soho glam scene, leaving behind one sadly underappreciated album and a few EP's before self-combusting. In a way, I sort of see the Roses as a British version of Enuff Z'Nuff. Not so much in terms of their sound but more of the fact that they were a group crowbarred in with glam who weren't really a natural fit there and kind of paid the price for it - I've always thought Enuff Z'Nuff sounded more like a Britpop band with flashbomb guitars than a hair metal band. Oh sure, ...
Read more

Garbage Days Revisited #19 - The Dictators - "Go Girl Crazy!" (1975)

Image
  "Set me free, I might know better when I'm older but till then..."  - The Dictators  - Weekend By some distance the oldest album we've featured in this column so far, I very nearly went for the Dictators' 2001 comeback album DFFD  for this feature similar to what I did with the New York Dolls GDR article a couple of weeks back but after a bit of umming and ahhing, I decided it really had to be the group's 1975 debut Go Girl Crazy!  just because it's arguably the great trailblazing US punk album that everyone's forgotten about. I guess that you could almost say that if the Ramones were the Sex Pistols of US punk then the Dictators were kind of like the Eddie & The Hot Rods in that they crashlanded just that one year too early to really reap the punk whirlwind when it took off in 1976-77 but if you listen to Go Girl Crazy! , it's got the fingerprints of a lot of bands who'd come along soon afterwards on it, especially da Bruddas. The big ...
Read more