Trevor William Church side-project Haunt has gotten good reviews ever since we reviewed their debut, Luminous Eyes, and If Icarus Could Fly is no exception to the consistently strong series of retro-NWOBHM EPs and full-lengths they've released since 2017. The Angel Witch worship of the band is still present, but with heavier elements and more soloing than before.

Run and Hide starts the album off right, with a faster beat than the band usually uses and some galloping to go with the lead noodling. Some of the songs afterwards are more mid-tempo, but the fast-moving guitar riffing and solo-heavy sound reappears on Winds of Destiny and Clarion. Underutilized (at least in recent years) techniques such as pairing a clean melody with overdriven chords from the second guitar also appear; Church's careful study of all things early-NWOBHM mean that the songs continue to sound like Haunt discovered the tunes on this album in a long-lost Angel Witch or DiAnno-era Iron Maiden demo.

I'm not an enormous fan of Church's voice, which is a lot gentler than the wild screamers of the early 80s, though this is made up for by his spot-on guitar work. This album has better riffs and solos than ever before, culminating in Defender, which outdoes itself in clever riffing, though without the strong tunes that some of the band's better-known British forebears brought with their offerings. Haunt has only made small tweaks to their sound here, but the albums keep getting better.

Bandcamp: https://hauntthenation.bandcamp.com/album/if-icarus-could-fly