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Agent Steel have a complex history, to say the least. They're best known for their debut, Skeptics Apocalypse, which is universally considered to be a defining classic of what's often referred to as Speed Metal. They broke up some time after their follow-up, Unstoppable Force, and afterwards had a string of reformations and break-ups due to legal pressure involving former vocalist and founder John Cyriis and other members of the band. They would go on to release three albums with singer Bruce Hall while Cyriis worked with his project SETI, with Cyriis returning to the band after Bruce left in 2010. Due to various circumstances, Cyriis was unable to perform live for the band, leading the remaining members to work under the name Masters of Metal and even releasing a new album under that name while the Agent Steel brand went silent for nearly a decade.

This brief history lesson is to point out that I honestly wasn't expecting too much from this. As one of the deranged subhumans who actually preferred the Bruce Hall era over classic Agent Steel, I was expecting this to be a pale shadow of what the band once was. This wasn't helped by their release of a couple of demos that were, frankly, awful, and the proper singles for the album didn't inspire much more confidence in me. However, I'll admit to finding myself pleasantly surprised with this album, albeit with some big caveats.

The first thing to note is that the speed is definitely back. Outside of the intro and outro track, which just repeats a single riff that's meant to sound otherworldly, every song on here is an assault of blazing riffs that never lets up. This wouldn't mean much if they sucked, but they're actually pretty sharp and engaging, and some of the lead work is downright gorgeous. Taken on the instrumentation alone, I'd have said that this is more than a worthy comeback album.

This brings me to my biggest problem with the album, which is the vocals of John Cyriis. Now, I'll be upfront and admit I've never been a fan of his voice, finding his midrange to be stuffy and unappealing, but at least in the old days he had a mighty wail to make up for that. Unfortunately, his voice has decayed quite a bit with age, but I could tell you that on the demo tracks where he sounded absolutely terrible. He sounds a bit better on here, but despite his claims that he used no effects on his voice, his already weak mid-range sounds tinny and irritating, and his often-labored highs can end up being akin to a struggling dentist drill. Whether or not that's studio trickery or just how he sounds now is anyone's guess, but either way it makes many parts of this album almost unbearable to sit through. This isn't helped by how much he multitracks himself and how he writes vocal lines that are meant to sound surreal and unhinged, but just end up being annoying as they clutter the songs and cover up the good parts of this album.

So here we have an album of good to better than good Thrash brought down by a dire vocal performance. Despite my complaints, there are plenty of good performances to be found on this album, and overall, it seems Cyriis still has what it takes to make some damn fine music. However, I really think he just needs to bite the bullet and get someone else to handle vocal duties, otherwise Agent Steel's comeback will end up more as a curiosity that was held back from being much more than that. Passable in the most exhausting way.