Time Stands Still melds new, old
METAL: Unleash the Archers combine medieval, futuristic imagery on new album
It’s not their mission to marry the new with the old, but that effort does illustrate the character of Unleash the Archers.
Singer Brittney Slayes long has maintained that Unleash the Archers like all kinds of heavy metal, but the proof is on its new Time Stands Still.
Much of it is fast, furious and can sometimes be overwhelming, but once in a while Unleash the Archers slow down, relatively, take a deep breath and fall back on a safety net of stabbing guitar riffs while Slayes summons Rob Halford of Judas Priest. One such song even has a kind of Judas Priest-like title, Test Your Metal.
“Live, Test Your Metal is one of the most fun songs to sing,” Slayes said. “We just wanted to show our diversity. We’ve never wanted to fit in a box at all.”
They don’t. The band’s imagery is a combination of the medieval and the futuristic, another example of merging the old and the new, and Time Stands Still, the band’s third album and first for an independent label, Napalm, has an epic quality reminiscent of Iron Maiden. Slayes sings with the fury and intensity of Maiden’s Bruce Dickenson.
Previously, the attempts to adhere to “traditional” metal while trying to be current sometimes resulted in such a thing as a growled backgroundvocalseemingtackedon.On Time Stands Still the ideas are more integrated, fitting in more comfortably, in a way suggesting Unleash the Archers are finding a style.
“That was the whole idea,” Slayes agreed. “We wanted to make a cohesive-sounding record. We have more of a direction, I’d say. We wanted to go for a traditional metal genre. We wanted to achieve a direction.”
The band — Slayes, Scott Buchanan, Grant Truesdell, Andrew Kingsley, Kyle Sheppard — was ready to take a big step.
“We were all pretty much raring to go,” she said. “We all knew we were going to give it our all.”
The new record was made in 2014 when Napalm came calling, putting its release on hold for eight months until the label was ready. The album will be out in North America on July 10. For the band, time stood still, but it was prepared to wait.
“They’re definitely a step in the right direction,” Slayes figured.
“A lot of people have described us as melodic death metal,” she said, searching for a way to characterize a marriage of old values and new ideas. “We all love that description.”