Yeth Hound

In this day and age, it's great when a band can make the energy in retro-style NWOBHM seem so effortless and unforced. Such is Tyfon's Doom, a Finnish one-man act with a ton of early Mercyful Fate and Di'Anno-era Iron Maiden influence, which succeeds in putting a stamp of its own on the heavy overdrive and galloping riffing. The new version of their EP, from Gates of Hell Records, a recent offshoot of Cruz del Sur specializing in heavy metal, tacks on some of the tracks from their demo of last year. The whole album's production is rough enough that some other bands might consider it demo material itself. The drums hiss, the reverb is out of control, and Tommi Varsala is not a terribly versatile singer -- he can sound like King Diamond in one of his lower octaves, but that's where he stays, and he sings slightly off-key in places, especially when he ventures into scream territory, an area in which he is not comfortable. Making up for these shortcomings is the same unquenchable excitement that the early NWOBHM bands brought to the genre. He's got the guitar sound spot-on, writes a brilliantly inventive pile of riffs to support every song, and his rhythms will get the most stolid listener headbanging in a few brief moments; the classic intro to Still Here, and the Cloven Hoof-style galloping on Galactic Flash/Last Ray of Light, are both high points. The songs sound hurried, as if Varsala had to finish recording his album before his roommates returned to his house and solved the problem by upping the tempo a bit, but the melodies are quirky, delightful affairs. The hatchet job done on the production, in a weird way, actually makes them much better than I think they'd otherwise be, making them choppy little bundles of energy with unconventional chord choices flying all over the place and getting into brief altercations with the off-key vocals. There are plenty of shortcomings on the album, but for an energetic, fun-to-listen-to record, you could do a lot worse than Yeth Hound. http://tyfonsdoom.bandcamp.com/.