TEXAS METAL OUTLAWS – Texas Metal Outlaws

This Thrash oriented, debut, self-titled album from Texas Metal Outlaws has a painfully long list of guest performers and features a slightly different line-up on every song. The “featuring” list is so long that I won’t print it here but you can check out the label’s bandcamp page to see the full lineup. The vast majority of the contributing musicians are from the Texas metal scene.

This band seems to be more of a vehicle for Texas based metal collaborations than an actual attempt at a band. Because of the ever changing lineups, from song to song, the album has an overall inconsistent feel to it, as if it was a festival compilation CD. The album production is acceptable for the genre, but not really something that would be considered good by modern standards. The drums are somewhat washy, vocal mixes vary from thin to middle-of-the-road and even some of the guitar takes could have used another pass. One has to wonder if there were too many fragile egos involved in a large scale project like this.

For fans of the Texas Thrash and Traditional Heavy Metal scenes, this will be an obvious buy, but there isn’t too much else here that can’t be had elsewhere and at higher quality. One nice touch to Texas Metal Outlaws, is the abundance of guitar solos. Some songs feature 2 or even 3 separate instrumental sections. Again though, like the changing lineups in the vocal positions, the ever changing guitar work gives the album a rather mismatched and uneven feel. The awesome cover artwork aside, for a debut, perhaps a more straight-forward, no nonsense album would have been a better choice.

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