Heaven the Axe :
This band is quite a heady and intoxicating mix. Take an ultra-hot blonde lead singer with a wicked voice, surround her with big ugly blokes who just happen to be some of the best heavy music instrumentalists in the country, throw in a bunch of supercharged, old school influenced hard rock to metal tunes (which will undoubtedly appeal to both hard rock and metal fans) and you have the beast that is Heaven the Axe. And they seem poised to take the country and even the world by storm in the coming years.
For a debut album, this band sure sound confident and assured. This no doubt comes from the pedigree of the members. The band features former members of legendary Aussie heavy music acts The Amenta, Damaged, The Berzerker and more, so these boys can seriously play. And soaring out the front of it all is the vocals of aforementioned hot blonde Phoebe Pinnock, whose voice resembles an even sassier Alanis Morisette after her vocal chords have been injected with rocket fuel.
Collectively they’ve come up with a bunch of short, sharp, in your face heavy rock tunes that would get any venue pumping. The songs are catchy as all hell and tough as nails all at once, and delivered with an exuberance that is truly infectious. That is, until you get to Unconditional Love, a tasteful acoustic/power ballad in the old lighter-waving 80s glam rock tradition, which rounds things off very nicely indeed.
Make sure you listen out for the ghost track that follows on a few minutes after the end of the album proper. It’s a more offbeat acoustic piece that probably doesn’t suit the vibe of the rest of the record, but shows a slightly different side to them.
The production job by the great Ren Parisi of Melbourne Records does absolute justice to the material, hitting that often hard to find balance between the raw power that this style of music needs and the polish required for the record to stand up on a world scale.
Heaven the Axe have made a very audacious beginning on their debut record, and one gets the feeling they will only get even better from here.
