We have an era in Hard Rock and Metal that some want to forget, but others kind of love it. I’m talking about the 80's Hard Rock that was already kind of becoming too soft and full of hairspray to my taste at the time already. Bands like POISON or BON JOVI created the bubblegum Hard Rock that usually make the girls happy for seeing their hairstyle represented in their male counterparts. This ridiculous preface is to say that in my Metal years, these are not the kind of bands that I gravitated towards (despite having a picture with CC Deville). The band we have today is trying to exactly bring back this genre adding a little humour to it. T

he band is HONEYBOMBS from Italy and they are releasing their second album There Is An Elephant In The Room. This is a dangerous genre unless you do not care to sound too cheesy, but I kind of like it the first 3 tracks “Living Among The Lies”, “Astenich” and the heavenly, “Feels Like Heaven” that starts with an impressive instrumental part with the use of double bass drums right in your face. The musicianship is high quality and you have some really tasty guitar duos shenanigans in the guitar solos. The band tries to get a little out of the shell of the song structures introducing some different tempos and a variety of riffs. However, it is not on every track. Some tracks are more basic Hard Rock like “I Spit On You” or “Falling Water” with a few ideas added to the tune but still sounding generic. Other tracks are much more interesting like “Berserk” and my favourite so far “Lothario Foppish” where the band shows some quality Thrash Metal. Did I just say Thrash Metal?

With guttural vocals and shit…The band seems to be shooting in all directions now. Sometimes they remind me of SLAUGHTER, sometimes AFI and sometimes like SLAYER. It gets a little inconsistent to my ears. You add to that some really cheesy ballads like “Antinomy” or “Awareness Birth” that are painful to hear in a Rock album. Opera? Really? And on the other hand you have good tunes like “Pavor Nocturnus” that have a good and energetic vibe. The singer is also not the best in my opinion. It seems that the backing up vocals can sing more to the style of some songs. Despite impeccable musicianship, the album has its flaws and suffers from not having a defined direction stylistically. With an album with 15 songs, it looks like the boys threw all the songs from the catalog on this album making it sound like 3 different albums.

Songs like “Hidden In Me” and “Insane Mind” seem not to belong to the same band. The best track of the album is now “Ocean In A Drop” that is a masterfully played acoustic tune with no vocals that  yet, brings another style to this already confusing album. A lot of potential, but not much focus.