The Beast from the East. Of Scotland.

Our man North of the border, The Red Wizard, gives us his take on the new outing from the mighty DevilDriver:

Let me start by saying these days most new metal seems lost on me. The influx of so many new "metal" bands with screamy vocals and Fall Out Boy meets Tim Burton visuals leaves me cold. It takes a lot to get me hot and sweaty for any new metal releases from bands I don't know too well.

Having said that I do posses all the DevilDriver back catalogue but wouldn't consider myself a die hard fan like MADman. So onto Beast, the 5th offering from Dez's boys. From the off this is a ferocious piece of work. Dead To Rights literally sounds like you're having rivets pounded into your head and the offbeat guitar parts work a treat. Everything on Beast sounds incredibly tight and extremely punchy as is often expected of DevilDriver.

Whilst not bulging with tons of shreddy guitars the lead work is very tasteful and never dominates any of the 16 tracks on the special edition version of the album. My main gripe with these songs is the titles themselves. Tracks like Shitlist and You Make Me Sick sound like the angst of a petulant teenager (though if I should ever meet Dez Farfara I'd never tell him as he sounds absolutely demonic). My song title gripe aside the content does have a degree of maturity that lacks from a lot of metal music that's coming out these days.

The special edition of Beast gives us 3 bonus tracks (one being a live version of Grinfucked) and a DVD featuring five music videos. However, the icing on the cake has to be the hour and a half documentary 'You May Know Us From The Stage' chronicling the rise of DevilDriver from day one through to the present day. All in all a package showing how determined DevilDriver are to go down in the history books as a metal band to take notice of.