Toronto-based band Heavens
Fire may not be a well enough known name in rock music, but they sure have
as interesting of a back story as any of the many bands to have come before
them. I personally think of Def Leppard’s
well documented misfortunes when I think of the heaven and hell that the band
has gone through over the past thirteen or so years. The story is well
documented on the bands Website, so
to shorten it slightly, after the release of their debut album in the year 2000
and what looked like a promising start having gained attention in Europe and
Japan, the band’s drummer suffered a very untimely death. Not long after that,
guitarist JT Harris was given months
to live after being diagnosed with cancer. After defying those odds and
surviving, JT’s father grew very ill
and the band was once again put on hold.
For the past few years, Skillet
have been the front runners in the slew of Christian rock bands to have hit any
success. This movement of bands who are labelled as Christian rock without any
complaint by the bands include artists such as Red, Thousand Foot Krutch,
Fireflight, and the list goes on.
The impressive thing about these bands is their ability to make music so easily
accessible to the ears of moderate rock fans, while sneaking in their own
messages of peace and goodwill and what have you in to their lyrics.
If you read my review on Monster Truck, you’d have read a bunch of words that sum up to me ranting and
raving about a band finally able to harness the sound of classic hard rock
and successfully modernize it and call the style their own. After a number of
bands that I have heard, some popular and some underground, who concentrate on
trying so hard to sound like what much of them refer to as the good old days of
rock, but lacking any true identity, Monster
Truck turned my hopes, and the hopes of many people in the world, including
Slash, that the future of hard rock
was in good hands.
I had so much fun writing about Halestorm’s The Strange Case Of... album a few months ago that I decided I’d go back to their
self-titled debut album. I discovered Halestorm
when the first Rockstar Energy Drink
Uproar Festival was announced. Since there was no way I was going to miss
what was essentially an Avenged
Sevenfold/Disturbed co-headliner, I checked out what other bands were going
to be there. Only two really caught my attention, and the main one was Halestorm. This was approximately a
year after the April 2009 release of their debut album, so I immediately went
to HMV to pick it up.
