Lista de los grupos NWOBHM The Handsome Beasts Beastiality

I'll be honest about the way how I found this band, first of all. It wasn't in any trip on encyclopedias - like this very website - searching for old Heavy Metal bands not very well-known to give it a bit of a "hipster" touch. It wasn't either on an attempt to deepen the so called New Wave of British Heavy Metal, searching for other underrated bands beside the ones we all know well. It was really on one of those boring Internet moments in which I search for music lists with dumb subjects. So, there I am, and I find a list with the worst/most stupid album covers ever. And I find this wonderful treasure.

Just the cover seems to scream "Stay away from this!" and to others it may counsel them "Do not hear this!". But after I finished laughing/getting scared with the cover, I didn't think it was enough, so I had to make a little research about the group and I ended up knowing it was an oldie British Heavy Metal band, that more discretely belonged to the NWOBHM, but in the lower levels, of course.

So, it being that way, why not giving it a listen? First of all, to hear the album you won't need to see the cover, even if you own an original copy - which is probably not very easy to find, I say. And by hearing it, is it anything special? No, not really. But you can forget that cover because the music is perfectly normal. It's 9 Heavy Metal themes "with balls", that kind of Metal that they knew very well how to do it in the early 80's. Alive guitars, with some really nice riffs. Songs with attitude and melodies making us want to shake our fists in the air. Even if they're not songs that can't be that much highlighted, one could even take from here some nice stadium anthems, if The Handsome Beasts weren't a band so "low on the card" - who knows if the album cover wasn't a fatal issue for a bigger better commercialization. All the songs are the simplest there can be in an old school Metal record, with the most complex "Another Day" extending itself to 8 and a half minutes.

So, this record with a cover that almost works as a protection shield, making the record itself be a little unaccessible, is not quite a lost pearl. Neither are The Handsome Beasts a big waste of talent of a band. Neither is this record anything astonishing. But for the old school Metal fans, they have a pleasant record here for some headbanging and some alternative anthems to those we are used to. And of course, we always have the wonderful cover...

Review originally written in Portuguese on my blog.
So, forgive any error that might be there, because of the difficulty of translating the article.

Rating: 14/20