Ravage
The End of Tomorrow

August 2009
Released: 2009, Metal Blade
Rating: 2.0/5
Reviewer: Alan Gilkeson

Already the reviews are overwhelmingly positive because it's American and old styled Power Metal, which the critics love because it fits into this mold we all want filled, new yet old, Heavy but intelligible. However THE END OF TOMORROW is riddled with gimmick, hardly creative or inventive, and sounds essentially like Grim Reaper, not so much sonically, but in it's ability to seem phony, copied, and hard to take seriously.



There's a huge difference between creativity and mimicking. Ravage mimic Heavy Metal. The hype of course is that they're taking old school metal, mixing it with this, mashing it with that, and thus cooking up some ingenious music. The fact is, this is not a mixture of anything. It's straight up Power Metal with awful vocals, dressed up in American clothes, full of Euro Metal's double bass and simple riffing. There are however some fairly inventive guitar solos scattered about a disc layered with hokey-ness, so let's give 'em a little bit of credit.



Ravage could end up being the American version of Hammerfall, except of course they're still in their early twenties and don't look as ridiculous as those old bastards across the Atlantic. Like Hammerfall, Ravage may be coming around at the right time, where old dudes are just happy to hear something new that sounds like the old days and youngsters can grab something that sounds old school but doesn't belong to their beer swigging Dads. However, that doesn't mean it's good.