Deaf Rat – Ban The Light

4/10

I am not a fan of false marketing. Deaf Rat´s description of their music is Led Zeppelin, Pantera, Black Sabbath & Guns N´Roses. Let us make something clear straight away: This description is far of the mark on my humble ears. A couple of more suiting references could be: Tesla, Hardcore Superstar, Slash Feat Myles Kennedy & Eclipse.
With that out of the way, let us dig into the album that is Ban the Light:

First of all; production is solid. You have heavy guitars, clean and healthy sound, hard pounding drums and good room for the vocals. Nothing to complain about there. Quality of the musicians are solid; these guys know how to handle their tools.
Unfortunately, they seem to have had the goal of doing a good enough album. Bar is set low, way too low. Good enough is for suckers. I think there is more quality than that in this band, just not on this album.
Nothing really stands out from this album, at least not in a positive way. Except for the title track that includes nice hooks, memorable melodies and some form of drive.

The rest of the songs can sometimes start out well, nice riff´s, but after 20 seconds the songs in general die a quick death and become boring. Another annoying thing (que Tesla reference) is the nasal sounding singer. All I hear is Nanny Fran.
A telling example is the ballad “Bad Blood”. After listening to the song a few times, I decided that if I had to choose between that and Scorpions “Wind Of Change”, Scorpions would win every time. And I hate “Wind Of Change”.

This album will probably go down well with some that do like their rock predictable and with as many re-used lines as possible in the lyrics. For me it just got tiring listening to what seemed to be the same “good enough” song over and over again. I woke up a bit with the title track and reacted slightly to “Welcome to hell” that has nice Paradise Lost (One second era) qualities.
Sorry Lads, I was not entertained.

Band: Deaf Rat
Title: Ban The Light
Label: AFM Records(produced by Erik Berglund & Deaf Rat)
Date of release: 2019-11-01
Rate: 4/10
Stand out track: Ban the Light