SIGN OF THE JACKAL
Heavy Metal Survivors

Drag your carcass back to the mid-80s and you’ll find every influence that has been poured into Italian’s SIGN OF THE JACKAL. Their third album “Heavy Metal Survivors” is quite frankly as average as they come. They’ve been around for 17 years according to their press release and one genuinely wonders what 2013’s “Mark Of The Beast” and 2018’s “Breaking The Spell” sound like. On this showing, I’m more unlikely to find out.

So, why is “Heavy Metal Survivors” not floating my boat? Well, the vocals of Laura ‘Demons Queen’ don’t exactly set the world alight. The screeching and slightly out of tone delivery sounds like nails down a blackboard. Within minutes of the first proper track, “Breaking The Spell”, I was wincing. It doesn’t get any better in the following tracks. “Buio Omega” is as traditional as they come, the flat production hampering any chance of being able to hear the instruments together but separate. Nope, it’s all one big mess which doesn’t allow any balance.

But back to the ‘Demons Queen’. The cliched “Pedal To The Metal” is horrible, her vocals a real struggle, whilst the WASP / Tokyo Blade / Warlock style pace is bloated and dull. How I sat through this sterile song is an achievement on its own. The short “Phantasm” comes next, a three-minute instrumental that sees some semi-decent guitar work and at least a break from the banshee’s wailing.

It doesn’t last long though, and the up-tempo “Slaves Of Hell” drifts neatly into the final section, and once more it’s the vocals that are giving me the headaches. The songs are average but competently played and are so immersed in that retro feel and flavour that it’s impossible to think of anything else.

Sadly, it’s 2024 and nostalgia doesn’t quite get me the same way it might have in the recent past. Add to the fact that if I want to listen to some thrash or heavy metal from that era, then that’s what I’ll do. Unlike Tailgunner, who seem to have marketed a retro yet modern sound, SIGN OF THE JACKAL have been unable to blend the best of those 80s bands with any contemporary sound, and instead sound like a rather poor covers band you’d see in a local pub.

“Nightmare City”, “Watch Out” with its semi-power metal feel, and the closing duo of “Shocker” (spoiler: it is!) and “(You Better) Run For Tomorrow” are all sadly very ordinary. In fact, they are worse than that and the final song is grating in the extreme. If this album was a colour it would have to be beige. There is nothing interesting about it at all. In a year when so many albums of high quality and excellence have arrived, this is a record to avoid.

Paul Hutchings