Crystal Viper – Queen Of The Witches

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I really can’t find the right words to express the pleasure it was to review this album. Crystal Viper‘s business is old school heavy metal, and even better, with a female singer, Marta Gabriel, who brings tons of grace and heavyness to their songs. By the way, Marta is also a guitar player and wrote all tracks of “Queen Of The Witches” after a three year hiatus due to health issues. It would be so easy to say that “Queen Of The Witches” reminds Doro Pesch and her old fellows of Warlock. But that’s not the truth. As a matter of fact, Crystal Viper belong to a very special and rare type of band: the ones that one can recognise at just one listening. “Queen Of The Witches” is full of style showing everything the band learned with the masters, more distinctly the German masters Accept, Helloween, Running Wild, Doro (of course), Grave Digger, and others. But that’s not all, “Burn My Fire Burn”, for instance, is a piece that could have been recorded by the all-time-queen-of-guitar Lita Ford.

Tracks like “Flames And Blood” show us how resourcefull the band can be on creating amazing guitar motiffs, catchy choruses, and riffs. And Venon fans rejoice! This track had the part of no one less than Mantas! Crystal Viper also pays the respect to Manowar’s Ross The Boss in “Do or Die” with galoping guitars and chorus giving the highlight.

It’s not so difficult to tell that “Queen Of The Witches” was a product of extreme carefull production and songwriting. Each track is meant to be unique, which avoids us, poor mortals, to have that extreme unpleasant feeling of “Hum, I’ve heard that before!”. Guitar bridges and solos were very well placed and carefully written showing the band’s worry with each track. Keeping the flame and the tradition, Crystal Viper recorded the timeless Grim Reaper’s “See You In Hell”. And it worked real fine.

“Queen Of The Witches” will be released on February, 17th by AFM Records and it was produced by Bart Gabriel. Well then, I can only say more that it was really worth the wait!

Track Listing:

  1. The Witch Is Back
  2. I Fear No Evil
  3. When The Sun Goes Down
  4. Trapped Behind
  5. Do Or Die
  6. Burn My Fire Burn
  7. Flames And Blood
  8. We Will Make It Last Forever
  9. Rise Of Witch Queen

You can watch “The Witch Is Back” music video below.