In my hands I’m holding Armor Class Invicible, Fifty Caliber Kiss’ debut record. I needed some research to find out how this cd is called, because the albumcover was almost unreadable. The artwork doesn’t look spectacular either with an image of the band on stage, death people edited with some photoshop-layers and some more strange art that looks so dark that you simply can’t see what it is. The different fonts that are used are also irritating, and I now love to quote my dad: “great albums always have great designs, those artists take care of everything”. I’m afraid for the contrary here..

Too bad, but the opposite is indeed true. I can live with a disappointing production, but the vocals are really bad. From growling to singing and even some spoken text; it all sounds awful. Like tracking live vocals for a record. The guitars and bass aren’t refreshing either, the only talented artist in this band is the drummer, who has some nice fills here and there. For example track 3, ‘High Is The New Low’, opens with good drumming violence, soon to be fucked up by the vocals and backing vocals though.

The biography that comes with the record states “Iron Maiden meets Pantera... yes, Metal is back!”. The writer of this sentence can’t be serious, but why should he make a sarcastic comment as disadvantage of the band? So he is serious. Now I can only interpret this as a bad joke. Fifty Caliber Kiss can’t be tagged by any the genres of these legends, and I’m not even gonna compare their skills. Destiny, Maroon and Narziss, those are bands that have similarities with Fifty Caliber Kiss. And then I’m not talking about the latest work of these German bands, but I mean their sound of four, five years ago. By the way, Fifty isn’t even from Germany. They are from Reading, Pennsylvania and I think that they should stay there, doing local gigs.