Band:	Savage Messiah
Album:	The Fateful Dark
Style:	Heavy metal, Thrash metal
Release date:	March 2014

01. Iconocaust
02. Minority Of One
03. Cross Of Babylon
04. Hellblazer
05. Live As One Already Dead
06. The Fateful Dark
07. Zero Hour
08. Hammered Down
09. Scavengers Of Mercy
10. The Cursed Earth
11. Be Quick Or Be Dead [Iron Maiden cover] [bonus]
12. Lightning To The Nations [Diamond Head cover] [bonus]
13. Killers [Motörhead cover] [bonus]

Savage Messiah offer on The Fateful Dark a journey down a very familiar road. This latest album bears all the trappings of your average melodic semi-thrash album, and often struggles to find some mark of personality, though it never succumbs entirely to mediocrity.

The first thing that struck me about Plague Of Conscience, which seems to have carried over into The Fateful Dark, is that Savage Messiah is just barely interesting enough to avoid being entirely generic. Vocalist Dave Silver has just enough rasp to temper those smooth, soaring, but largely character-less pipes. Guitar harmonies crop up frequently and uninvited, and the riffs seem like they were dug up piecemeal and rearranged into songs through a series of coin tosses. Only a handful of songs really stick out, while the rest recede into the background tapestry of hook-filled power-thrash.

The Fateful Dark is just kind of? there. Yes, it's wildly generic, but somehow not too generic in any direction. It isn't one of those conventional-but-outstanding albums; its orthodoxy doesn't make it terribly boring, nor does it give the sense that this is metal done absolutely right in classic fashion. It occupies the space between unremarkable and standard, if that makes any sense. The album performs its function in an appropriate manner. The Fateful Dark delivers mildly interesting thrash songs sanded down by melodic hooks, with enough charm to save itself from being a lackluster disaster.

The album picks up in its second half, with "Zero Hour" and "Scavengers Of Mercy" qualifying as pretty darn good songs. They join "Cross Of Babylon" as the primary draws of The Fateful Dark, or at least the tracks to return to should you feel like listening more than once. Not that there would be any harm in going through this album a few times; it might flirt dangerously with blandness, but it is still a fun piece of music to have lying around.

Perhaps this review casts too harsh a light on The Fateful Dark. It does, really, but the only way I know how to describe this album is by calling it different varieties of simple (though I don't want to hurt its feelings). Overall, I never find myself regretting the choice to listen to some more Savage Messiah, and even if it's nothing special, it's still some good, clean fun, and it gets better with each successive listen.