Goose bumps appear on my arms as soon as I start playing “Sound & Fury”, the latest DUST BOLT album. These Germans have found a good way to mix Thrash metal with Melodic Rock and even Moder Metal. The result of all these influences thrown together is that for the first few times you listen to their music, you feel it is lacking. In intensity, diversity, depth and quality. That is, until you really start listening, without any distractions. That’s when you realise that these Germans (Landsberg am Lech, Bavaria, actually) have a knack to make it all gel in an almost perfect way.

By the way, “Sound & Fury” is actually the fifth album by DUST BOLT, the first four being “Violent Demolition” (2012), “Awake The Riot” (2014), “Mass Confusion” (2016) and “Trapped In Chaos” (2019). I can’t say I ever heard any of their earlier work, but if that is in the same vein as what they offer here, I am definitely interested in finding out how that sounds. The heaviness of the finishing riffs in a song like “I Witness”, or the playfulness of the riffing in “I Am The One” are only two of the examples of how different the songs are. What they have done right is make sure that the sound is the same all through the record, which only adds to the cohesion that alleviates any mediocre album into a good one. In the case of “Sound & Fury” it helps it climb from a good one into the Very Good class.

What also helps is having a singer that can handle all the different directions the band is taking musically. Believe me is I say that Lenny Bruce has no problem in that department at all. He only uses his clean voice, but knows how to bend it just right as to fit to the style of the music being played. In the 45 minutes of Thrash Metal with sidesteps he doesn’t put a vocal cord wrong. But then again, neither do any of the instrumentalists within DUST BOLT. As for the production, it is flawless, again due to Lenny Bruce. That man is a certain gold mine for DUST BOLT, and has made sure what all the band members together put on the table has been morphed into a very pleasant album with awfully good music. “Sound & Fury” is without doubt the right title for this excellent slab of music.