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Icarus Witch are a band near and dear to me since I first found their Roses on White Lace EP years ago, but I'll admit I wasn't terribly keen on their material after Matt Bizillia, as the band got more commercial and less mystical at that point. True, they'd always had their toes in the radio-friendly side of '80s metal, but they evened it out with a dark, arcane mood on old classics like Capture the Magic and Songs for the Lost, and without that the band became far less interesting to me. That said, I'll admit Goodbye Cruel World was a noticeable step up from the limp Rise, and Andrew D'Cagna is a fine singer, so I was more than willing to give their latest album a chance. As it turns out, No Devil Lived On is their first album in a while to sound like it was made by Icarus Witch.

Musically, this is still in the vein of recent works with smooth songwriting that focuses on the clean, agile guitar work that's always been a strongpoint for the band, it's just that they've once again started mixing in some of the old mysticism of previous works, albeit with a lighter edge. One of the big selling points is the addition of keyboards, but they're used as a light accent rather than a main focus, which helps give the songs an arcane air without diluting the metal. The rest of the band is as tight as you'd expect, with some really strong bass work and drumming in places, and Andrew sounds better than ever. Some of the material here is still a bit commercial for my taste, such as the advance single "10,000 Light Years From Home," and I can't say there's anything here that matches songs like "Darklands" and "Afterlife," but songs like opener "Heaven's Ghetto," "Rise of the Witches," and the massive 10-minute closing epic "Starseed Trilogy" are closer than I thought the band still had in them. A return to form.