Hi everyone, I’m Rick, and this is the new Lovebites Album. Judgement Day.
If you follow my blog (you probably don’t) or my reviews on RYM and AOTY (you also probably don’t), you probably know that I quite like Lovebites. They’re a japanese all-female power metal band that has been active since 2016, it includes many former members of Destrose in it, and since their first day they became very big in the Japanese metal scene. Their first album, 2017 Awakening from Abyss, is an amazing power/speed metal album, with some great riffs, epic songs and an overall very good performance by pretty much everyone involved.
However, i admit, my opinion on them, didn’t really hold up well after all these years and the many years all that well, their second LP Clockwork Immortality, while it grew on me after a while, did really left a bad taste in my mouth when it first came out in 2018, and it’s considered by me as their worst album. Their third, 2020’s Electric Pentagram, was a big improvement on their former album but not a really big one, it had some really bad parts like being way too long, having dumb lyrics and having a really dull, loudness war filled production. Of course the riffs and the energy still made this album a pretty good one, but these last two albums by then, weren’t exactly their best ones.
So here we come to this album, released 3 years after their former one, their first without original bassist Miho, who was replaced by Fami in 2021, which is in my opinion a very good replacement, all respect to Miho, but the bass here is much more present and feels much more useful to the songs and the atmosphere than it used to have before, which makes me, a person who likes playing bass a lot, very joyful.
This is also full with some genuinely amazing riffs, some of the best the band has made are all here, highlights including the insane thrashy riffs of "We Are the Resurrection", "Stand and Deliver (Shoot 'em Down)" and "Dissonance", the amazing pure power metal riff of the title-track, that also has a great bass intro and outro in it, something “Stand and Deliver'' also has. These two songs, “Stand and Deliver” and “Dissonance” are very interesting songs as they are thrashy in a very different way from most of the band’s output. Since these songs have, in that order, a very uncharacteristic Anthrax-esque almost crossoverish riff that is incredibly heavy AND catchy. Although the chorus is still pretty power metal. Which is not the case of “Dissonance”, which with the exception of the very melodic chorus, is a very heavy, dark pure thrash song about what i assume zombies (“what i assume” it’s obviously about zombies), It’s a great song and one of my favorites of the album, although not my favorite, this title goes to “Wicked Witch”, a beautiful Somewhere in Time era Iron Maiden-esque song with a beautiful catchy riff and guitar solo, amazing melodies and a great vocal performance by Asami. There are also lots of amazing moments in “Lost in the Garden”, the longest song in the album, and one with many beautiful melodic moments, like its beautiful guitar intro, and it's great solo, like many others here. The album is closed by “Soldier Stands Solitarily”, another great power metal song, that really works well as a closing to this album. There are another many other great things about this, the vocal performances are like always great, the guitar work by Midori and Miyako is like always the greatest part of this record, it’s full of memorable riffs, solos and passages, the album also feels much more compact and less overly long than their last album. Which is a great thing at least for me. Overall it’s an amazing album.
It has bad things though, and some really annoying ones, to start i’m talking the mixing, which i already said before but the mixing of all of their albums are horrible and here it couldn’t be any different, the album is both mixed to sound super loud and being extremely undynamic, but also the guitars, while great on their own, sound a bit thin and lacky at points, which really affects the album negatively in ways that are very unfortunate, also there’s the lyrics question, yes the lyrics are really dumb, like i’m not going to tackle many of them, since power metal is not exactly known for great lyricism, but here the lyrics are really dumb, they’re shallow and don’t really mean anything at all, i will not give many examples, with the exception of one, which is “What is the difference between believing and Doubting” in “The Spirit Lives On”. There is, in fact, a fuckton of difference between believing and doubting. I understand they meant it as some kind of super deep stuff, or something like that, but yes, it’s super stupid. But it’s still okay, as i really like all songs here, well, except “My Orion” which sounds like a bad Journey song, and it’s completely forgettable, but overall, it’s still an album i really like a lot. and an album that I'm happy that ended up the way it did.
I don’t think there’s much to say anymore, this was Judgement Day it’s a great record all things considered. The riffs are amazing, the vocals are great, the songwriting is much better here than it was in the last two albums, the heavier songs are some of the best of the band. Sure, the production, the mixing and the lyrics leave a little to be desired, but that doesn’t change the fact that it’s overall a big return to form for them and that it’s their best album since their debut 6 years ago. My score is a...
SCORE:7.6
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