RAUNCHY

A completely convincing mixture of FEAR FACTORY, STRAPPING YOUNG LAD and MACHINE HEAD, Denmark's RAUNCHY are easily the country's best-kept secret and possibly one of the finest European “modern metal” bands I have heard in quite some time. The group's debut album, spectacularly produced by INVOCATOR mainman Jacob Hansen, is chock-full of excellent riffing, impressive vocal melodies and enough raw, unadulterated power to put most of their American counterparts to shame.

Whatever RAUNCHY may lack in the originality department, they make up with the sheer ferociousness of their delivery, which is nowhere better evident than in the killer opener “Twelve Feet Tall” (download full MP3 here),a first-rate cut that is as brutal as it is utterly catchy. The rest of the album, while featuring material of varying tempos and levels of aggression, is consistently song-oriented, with big, fat hooks always at the core of the band's songwriting, which is clearly far more advanced than their youthful status would otherwise suggest.

Released through a small Danish label called Drug(s) (a subsidiary of Mighty Music),Velvet Noise has thus far failed to receive the kind of attention it truly deserves, and this can only be considered a disservice to the metal community as well as the band themselves, whose music is bound to be appreciated by fans of all the above-mentioned groups as well as anyone else into crushingly heavy tunes with an emphasis on catchy choruses.

For more information, visit RAUNCHY's official web site at this location.