Alright, the new Nightrage album is out and A New Disease Is Born is the first cd to feature Jimmie Strimmel behind the mic instead of Tomas Lindberg. Make no mistake though, Jimmie didn’t just get off the plane yesterday and hop in the band, he has been touring and performing as the singer of Nightrage for close to two years now. Leader and guitarist Marios as well as bassist Henric remain from the Descent Into Chaos era. Since Gus G booked out of the band a couple of years ago Marios performs the lead work on A New Disease Is Born. Dragonland mates Olof and Elias help out by playing a couple of solos and Elias supplies the keyboard duties.

A few things are obvious right after pressing play on the stereo. Nightrage in 2007 is a different beast than it was when it reared its head four years ago. The band has lost much of its “super group” status (former members and guest musicians include, Per Jansen, Tom Englund, Mikael Stanne, Brice Leclerq, and the aforementioned Tomas and Gus G.) so now Nightrage is standing firm on both feet and proving that they are not here just to wither away. Now don’t get me wrong, I really enjoyed Sweet Vengeance but it lacked the identity that A New Disease Is Born has. Jimmie has a much more versatile voice than Tomas and utilizes different growls and offers up some fabulous clean vocals that I didn’t even know was in him. Instead of just doing the how does Angela from Arch Enemy put it? “…the At The Gates verse and the Creed chorus…”, Jimmie uses his singing more to accent certain phrases of the song and give clarity or urgency to that particular passage. A Condemned Club is a great example of this. Here is a mid paced song with lots of melody and Jimmie has backing clean vocals to harmonize with the growls in the outro. Another great foot stomper is Scathing. A clean sweeping guitar intro segues headfirst into some sexy solos before going full throttle into a scream fest with an anthemic chorus. Speaking of clean guitars, they pop up here much more than on the previous two releases. Surge Of Fury has the trifecta of clean acoustics overlaid with a classic sounding lead guitar line, and Jimmie’s powerful growl. As for full on head banging songs, Spiral, Death Like Silence, and Scars fulfill those roles quite nicely. Scars should get a mention for its liberal Iron Maiden worship in the leads. That’s a compliment by the way.

A New Disease Is Born is a powerful album. This has great sounding solos, heavy hard hitting riffs, versatile vocals, I mean, how much more demanding can I be? Nightrage are no longer a band that needs to rely on star power to bring in new listeners, the songs on A New Disease Is Born will do that for them.