The Cloudycators hail from Finland with their album Land Of The Cloudycators. They have quite a heavy style, full of chunky guitar riffs and some nice gritty and aggressive vocals coupled with solid songwriting to make an album worth a listen for fans of 90s metal mixed with modern choruses.

The album opens with "Animal" and this one opens with a very lowdown and dirty guitar riff with a stabbing rhythm section before the band crashes in properly, bordering on an almost PANTERA-like sound with chugging verses, before a more tender clean section before the chorus which has some almost MUSE style moments surprisingly enough! Plenty of anger throughout the verses though and lots of heavy moments interspersed with different moments make this a good opener to the album!

From the more straight up rockers like "Cenobite" which is similar to the opener but a lot more aggressive, to slower tracks like, funnily enough, "Cuntkiller", which turns down the tempo but ups the heaviness, with some awesome riffs that almost border on sludge metal before going into clean sections later on, this album is full of lots of different things carried out well by the band and really held up by the vocalist who doesn't limit himself to one vocal but carries out a range of dynamic approaches very effectively, from some kind of EVERGREY moments like in "Drunken Easy Night" to more aggressive approaches of tracks like those mentioned previously which have a bit of a Phil Anselmo vibe to them. There's also a ballad in the form of the track "Wandering" which features the standard fare of acoustic guitars and a softer approach to the vocals. What I like about this one though is the almost "southern-fried" style feel to the vocals and the nice heavy chorus featuring some nice guitar chords.

The album finishes up with "When Rain Comes Down" ends things with a cool build up with distant sounding guitars and a nice melancholic sounding vocal before later on bringing the smackdown with some awesome heavy guitars smashing in. This is a nice emotive sounding track with quite a bluesy approach to the vocals that actually works well with the modern sounding guitars in the track.

The production makes the album sound nice and heavy, with guitars sounding very crunchy overall, and a good drum sound helps things too. The vocals are very well produced in particular, capturing the singer very well. The bass sounds great in the moments where it's not drowned out by guitar but as I've said before this is something that happens in most modern albums and the bass probably comes across much better live anyway.

This is quite a solid album from THE CLOUDYCATORS with some interesting songwriting ideas and an approach that blends some different styles with quite good results.