A spacey, machine-like intro leads Katagory V’s latest offering into a steady, mood-raising barrage of catchy time changes and edgy guitar work. Shades of pre-Mindcrime Queensryche come to mind. Singer Lynn Aller has some strong pipes to back the soaring vocal lines that are anything but easy to pull off. I wouldn’t call it mind-boggling but the guy can certainly hold his own in this style of metal. Hostile Takeover features some gruffier delivery and very high-pitched wails that are handled with skill as well.

The nice vocal harmonies and atmospheric melodies make Will You Remember my favourite track off the album. The quite dramatic feeling plus the Englund-ish vocal delivery make it almost sound like a long lost Evergrey song. The aggressive title track fiddles with more odd-timed beats and heavier guitar work to great effects. Fading In... provides the mandatory balladering with style. The nicely grooving Risk And Sacrifice not only provides a great song, but also one of the most overused bass lines in metal history. I’d hate to sound too much like the rock police here but I crack up upon hearing the classic triplet grind that has been instantly recognizable since Black Sabbath’s Heaven And Hell and Dio’s Holy Diver every now and then from different artists.

The production is mostly of good quality, but it occasionally has odd, momentary downfalls. For example, the blast beat-section with the tremolo-picked pseudo-black metal riff in the beginning of the eight-minute, slightly dragging The Elitist sounds comically like your average penguin-painted band from Norway in it’s later demo stage, but becomes much better once the mid-tempo verse begins.

The Rising Anger is full of quality metal that doesn’t have any major flaws. At the same time the major highs are few and far in between as well. The only problem really is the lack that definitive factor that would rise the band above several others from this corner of melodic and technical metal.

To check out tunes, go to: Katagory V downloads