Without any biography or whatsoever I received a promo from The Black Halos. So I had to do an information hunt myself. Within a couple of minutes I got to know The Black Halos from Vancouver who started more than a decade ago and released their self titled debut in 1999. Until this day two more albums were made by The Black Halos, The Violent Years in 2001 and Alive Without Control in 2005. Well, so far the history lesson about The Black halos and their albums.

 

This promo is a re-release of their first two albums called The Black Halos and The Violent Years and to be honest most of the time I’m not very happy with re-releases. Most of the time they’re just a way to make some extra money, but considering that their earlier releases are probably not available in every record store I can live with this one.

 

The album starts with ‘Some Things Never Fall’, taken from The Violent Years and is followed by ‘Retro World’ of their self titled album, this makes it clear that there is not a logical order in the songs. The musical mix between the New York Dolls, The Stooges and a bit of The Ramones doesn’t sound very original and is probably done a million times before. But the songs on this disc sound great; plain simple rock songs that are easy to identify with. Especially with songs like ‘Sell-Out Love’, ‘Start The Violence’ and ‘The Last Of The 1%ers’ I feel the tendency to dance along and imagine myself onstage.

 

For the fans of The Black Halos it’s a great opportunity to make their collection complete and for the record company it’s a great way to overcome the time between their latest album and the next one. For me it’s kind of hard to give this disc a score because from both albums there are just 5 songs available on the disc. So I decided to give both albums a different score and take the average of those two scores.