Battlecross – Pursuit of honor

“Pursuit of honor” is the debut album from Battlecross.  As you can probably tell from the spelling of the title, Battlecross are from the USA (Detroit to be precise).  The band was formed in 2007 and are best described as Thrash metal.

Battlecross have definitely gone for speed and power with the album – there’s plenty of both here.  The vocal style is quite varied, sometimes its screams, sometimes more of a growl.

The album starts off with “Pursuit of honour”, a very gentle melodic guitar and piano intro which in its last seconds starts to rise to a peak before the second track kicks in – “Push pull destroy”, which is the first real song on the album and which kicks off with wailing guitars, screaming vocals and relentless pounding drums.

From there on the album remains at full power the rest of the way.  Its a hard album to categorise – it blends elements of thrash metal and death metal to form a brutal sound.  This album sounds great but I suspect in a live setting its going to be superb as its perfectly suited to the power and energy you get at a good metal gig.

This is a very promising debut album.  Lots of finger shredding guitar work, punishing drums and good screaming/growling vocals.  This album should appeal to a lot of thrash fans in particular.

Rating 7/10

“Pursuit of Honor” is available now on Metal Blade records.

Battlecross is:

Kyle ‘Gumby’ Gunther – Vocals
Tony Asta – Guitar
Hiran Deraniyagala – Guitar
Mike Kreger – Drums
Don Slater – Bass

Track listing:

1. Pursuit of honor
2. Push pull destroy
3. Kaleb
4. Deception
5. Man of stone
6. Breaking you
7. Rupture
8. Leech
9. Better off dead
10. Misery
11. Foreshadowing