Hi there,

-We just received reports that a new review of CAROLINE BLUE's "Slave to the Hourglass" has just been posted at the Encyclopaedia Metallium Website by Muloc of the U.K.! Click HERE to check it out.

-For those who can't wait to read it :)

I'm a slave to the hourglass! - 75% Written by Muloc7253 on April 3rd, 2008

Seeing as I've been sent a lot of modern deathcore and whatnot the last few weeks, it was refreshing to pop Caroline Blue's debut EP 'Slave to the Hourglass' into my cd player and have my ears greeted with some excellent hard rockin' 80s heavy metal.

And the great thing about Caroline Blue is how aware of themselves they are. There is no pretensiousness or silly gimmicks here, nor is this a Darkness/Wig Wam attempt at resurrecting as many silly cliches from the 80s and 70s as possible (even though I do like both of those bands). These guys just take a simple structure, some good catchy rocking riffs and good but not pretensious vocals to belt out some cool, powerful classic metal songs. On top of that they have some excellent solos, nothing ridiculously technical, just enough to give the songs a bit more juice.

Structurely this is about as typical as traditional metal can be, but that's partly what's so good about it. A composition-style that I'm familiar with and enjoy a lot, used to create some excellently catchy and addictive rock/metal songs. My choice cuts would be the slightly epic opening title track, 'Hard Life' (which funnily enough, slightly reminds me of 'A Hard Day's Night' in the chorus) and 'The Queen of Pleasure'.

Oh yeah, and there are some bonus tracks. The first is a pretty nice guitar instrumental, I could live without it but it's still a pretty decent addition, and then next is a recorded message from what sounds like a landlord informing the band that the neighbours have been complaining about late-night loud drums and one of the band members humping a stuffed animal in the window. My kind of band!

-Let us know what you think!

Click HERE to see it. below is a translation thanks to Andrea!

"From the state of New York, Caroline Blue is a solid
melodic hard-rock trio moved by classic inspiration taken
from Kiss, but never figuring as a their cover band, and
never as rakes and lack of personality. Indeed, Caroline
Blue weight down the sound in phase of riffing, and run with
a rythmical section aggressive and more powerful
guaranteeing a precise trademark. "Slaves To The
Hourglass" is their first studio work, a five tracks
EP(more two hidden tracks that does not add a lot in matter
of quality: an acoustic instrumental song, and a telephone
call by Wayne while promoting the record), dynamic and
spontaneous that let truly imagining a monstro attitude to
the live show dimension(very large is the number of cover
songs in their own catalogue). Title-track and "The Queen
Of Pleasure", in this sense, express on the better way the
concept of CB's "wall-of-sound". In auge for sure we
have Wayne Johnson, vocalist, determined and visceral
axe-man who drags all the compositions in a vortex made by
electricity and sweat, in a certain way paying tribute to
Paul Stanley, but able to communicate his own personality
and rock'n'roll glamour. The producing, unfortunately, is
not the best one. The sound is too much stuffed with
wadding, and drums sounds too much like as in the '80, but
i'm also speaking about a kind of autoproducing, and
therefore lack of technology to "clean or modernize the
sound". Anyway, are Caroline Blue the "next big thing"? They
surely could be it. The potentialities does not lack, the
same to say in fact of determination to assert
themself(furious is the promotion on the web, so much
organized and detailed). At last just a note to say that the
band members signed on the cd credits are not same than
actual(except Wayne), and therefore i do not know the
effective quality of the new ones, but voices said that
their recently live performances has been great. Then, what
we have to do is to wait for the full-lenght record, but
this Ep is a nice aperitif that open your stomach as well
until that time."

Appresial: 73/100 -->EZCODE ITALIC END-->

Hiya! We jusy got word of a great review of CAROLINE BLUE's CD "Slave to the Hourglass" from the website Metal to Infinity (Belgium). Click HERE to see the page or just read below!

CAROLINE BLUE's CD "Slave to the Hourglass" has just been reviewed on Oblivion.de in Germany. It can reached by clicking HERE Below is a transcript of the review in English (translated by Ela-thanks!)...

In addition, Walter Scheurer's review from powermetal.de has found it's way to another German site at Underground Empire.com. Click HERE to check it out. A translation to this review has been posted in our earlier blog in regards to the powermetal.de review.....