The mighty Goat Horn. The fact that this is self-released shows how clueless labels can be. They should have been signed after "Voyage to Nowhere", or at the very least right after the release of the excellent "Storming The Gates". Go figure. Anyway, "Threatening Force" is an EP limited to 1000 copies that includes three new songs, and a re-recording of "Fate Strikes" and "The Last Force" off "Storming The Gates". The first track is... Well... I'm not sure what it is. It's 14 seconds long and to me it sounds like somebody falling off a flight of steel stairs! :) Things get more to the point after that. The new songs are very much in the vein of the band's heaviest material, with the distinction that the singer experiments with slightly cleaner vocals, a departure from his signature raucous style used in the previous albums. This is OK overall, but his singing was already clean enough so I'm not sure if he's just doing this for the EP or if he will adopt the style for the next full length as well. Anyway, it's not bad at all, but I prefer his former style to this. He does not hold this cleaner singing too much either, sometimes reverting to his good ol' self, like on the heavy metal anthem "Right Heavy Metal" where he kind of split things in two.

This has something to please any Goat Horn fan: Sound and music that put "heavy" back into "heavy metal" (and then some), the same heavy guitars, crunchy riffs, the raw sound that scratches the crap out of your ears and the just downright palpable metal attitude that was present in their previous releases are alive and well on "Threatening Force", and this bodes well for the future. Of course EPs like this one are annoying because they're such teasers and there's almost always some disposable stuff on them (re-recorded songs for instance...) This feels more like an extension to "Storming The Gates" - if it weren't for the cleaner vocal style, the three new songs could very well have been on that album. Alright guys, enough teasing, give us a new full-length already. ;)