Band:	Fallstaf
Album:	Bastard Sons Of A Pure Breed
Style:	Groove thrash metal
Release date:	October 2011

01. Dark Days
02. The Cost
03. Eulogy
04. Not Welcome
05. Pull The Knife
06. My Demons (Acoustic)
07. Ten Years In Flames
08. The Hounds
09. Fuck The Fence
10. My Demons
11. Violent As Violence Can Be

Brass metal, eh? Usually when a band creates a faux-genre name to describe the music they play, it generally means there's some gimmicks afoot. Here's where we usually throw a curve ball at you, and try to describe how such-and-such a band is actually something special. Unfortunately, that isn't the case with Fallstaf; it's a fairly boring band which uses the presence of a trombone to give their otherwise unimpressive music some kind of personality.

If there's any band that deserves it's own moniker of "brass metal", it's Diablo Swing Orchestra. Fallstaf is no Diablo Swing Orchestra. It's a pretty basic hardcore/crossover type sound; shouty vocals & primarily chugging, rhythm focused guitars. Despite that sound being fairly run of the mill, it really doesn't need the trombone, yet they seem to try and make the trombone the lynchpin in their music, it just doesn't work. The thing is, they don't seem to write as a cohesive unit, it sounds like they came up with the riffs, vocals, drums, bass etc, realized how generic it sounded, then slapped some trombone in there. Very rarely does it not sound completely out of place in a really obtrusive way, or just sit in the background aimlessly. Fallstaf is a band that added all the extra bells and whistles in all the wrong places.

The funny thing is, Fallstaf in it's most basic form doesn't sound all that bad. In fact, if they put more time into the riffs instead of trying to crowbar some unnecessary elements in, they might actually sound like a cool crossover act. Hell, they might even get away with stealing more riffs from High On Fire from time to time - "Pull The Knife" sounds a little too suspiciously similar to "Waste Of Tiamat" to not raise a few plagiarism alarms.

Despite the fact that Bastard Sons Of A Pure Breed is a pretty weak album, I wouldn't be so quick to completely write off Fallstaf; they've got a few rough ideas that don't sound entirely bad, they just need A LOT of work.