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This is Fozzy's fourth album, Chasing the Grail, and they're mostly known because their singer is WWE wrestler Chris Jericho. He formed this band around 2000 but I hadn't heard any of their material. I expected this to be a nu-metal/hard rock style offering, but to my pleasant surprise this is really a metal album. Every element that you expect in Heavy Metal is present here as this is a band effort not just a platform for Jericho to show off, and that is a good thing (more on that below).

Things start out quite well in the opener "Under Blackened Skies." It's an energetic song that puts you in the right mood when listening to the record. Unfortunately, "Martyr No More", "Wormwood" and "Paraskavedekatriaphobia (Friday The 13th)" are the only other tracks that I liked. The rest of the album is composed of mid-paced songs that are not quite as good as Jericho wanted them to be ("Broken Soul" is as generic a song as it can get). And that seems to be one of the main problems with this album, the lack of variety found here, combined that with the constant feeling that the songs are dying to break out and you have of a somewhat incomplete record. Production-wise, this is no doubt an expensive job, you can hear every instrument the way you want to and everything feels well balanced.

The band is composed of a bunch of capable musicians. You have heard the riffs, solos and everything else on this album before. However there is no sloppiness and everything is well executed, which leads me to Jericho's voice. In short, by listening to the album many times I've come to the conclusion that he doesn't have a very good natural voice. The reason I say that is that they used a lot of sound effects and studio help. Most of the time he reminds me of Ozzy Osbourne. Fortunately, his voice isn't front and center all the time so at least he was smart enough to let the rest of the band shine.

At the end of the day, I felt that the album could have been trimmed down 15 minutes or so and do wonders to it. As it stands, Chasing the Grail is a very long, average album that will attract non-metal listeners because of Jericho's first career. If you decide to buy it, you'll listen to an album that has its moments but not a remarkable one as a whole. Still the best thing that I can say about it is that it may open doors for people to listen to similar and much better bands.