Coming out of Cleveland, Ohio is Mo Rage and this their debut album, Fix of Rage. There aren’t any frills here, no gimmicks, no church burning, dragon slaying, angst ridden ploys; these guys play heavy metal without any compromises. Opening number The Storm is a perfect example of this. A straight ahead and square metal riff and aggressive high singing with an extremely focused chorus are all rounded off by a vintage sounding guitar solo. I say vintage because it brings to mind old school Black Sabbath with its harmonies and textures. Although a great opener it does set the bar quite high from the get go and unfortunately not every song on here can match its level. Cromagnum is slower than its predecessor and much more crunchy. One aspect of it that I don’t find particularly appealing however is the shouted vocals at the beginning, they rub me in exactly the wrong way. When vocalist Tony Webster goes into his normal mid range to high singing then everything goes back to being just fine, maybe gang shouts or layered vocals could be tried out to make the aggressive intro shouts more fleshed out and forceful. Battlecry, with its great lyrics about the clan wars of Scotland, is a terrific song to play to get yourself pumped up before a big match or to go out and face the day. The rest of the tracks on the album are similar in pattern, they are midpaced and very traditional sounding with sparse usage of the shout style scattered throughout.

Overall I would say that Mo Rage definitely know their game plan and have their shit together. Songs like The Storm and See Ya are worthy of throwing in the ring with some big name bands they are that good, especially the latter which goes from a ballad into a great fist pumper, however there are still moments where some more refining is needed. An aspect that I think the band needs to work on is song length, this disc is less than thirty minutes long with all but two songs under three minutes and forty five seconds long. It is rare for a band to nail it down on their first demo, but Mo Rage has an advantage that most do not, they have talent.