With a pastime for hunting the hunters and killing the killers of intelligence, love, and truth, Paul Maged creates a soothing mix of pickpocket 80’s heavy metallic thunder. He takes dashes of all the popular groups, with a certain mix of sincere irony, Metallica, and ’89 Megadeth, and does his best to add his own lyrical as well as vocal flourishes.
But do any of these new additions give meaning or weight to those consistently replicated sounds? Yeah, a little bit.
Paul has a lower leveled Dickinson quality to his voice, though of course the melodies are not completely what you might call ideal. Burn It To The Ground is the second song on here and it stands out to more than the opener simply due to Maged’s choir boy becomes Holy Man cadence. Is it more memorable because it is better or because it takes a break from the same old song and dance this album conjures so frequently? Ahh who cares… BURN IT. BURN IT. BURN IT TO THE GROUND BEFORE THE BRAINWASHED MOB GETS US.
Give it a listen and tell us what you think.
Chris Sheldon of Foo Fighters fame mixed 4 of the 5 songs on the album and it certainly shows considering how lush, warm, and pedal-driven these tracks sound. But why the name?
“I titled this album, ‘Crossroads’ because I’m at one personally and our country is at one as well. I wanted to explore the relationship between the internal struggle of every human and the external struggles of our society.”
That struggle is heard, and each internal issue Paul has with himself is commanded gracefully by an electric guitar that knows exactly what it is doing. The tone and licks on this album alone are well worth the listen for regular metal heads or rockers who want to get a little bit of their Broadway on in between the next Aerosmith bar band set.
