Band:	Griffin
Album:	No Holds Barred
Style:	Heavy metal
Release date:	October 2003

01. The Sentence
02. Unbreakable
03. Praise The Rain
04. New Boss
05. Weightless
06. Heavy Metal Overload
07. Second Time Around
08. Fleet Street Superstars
09. Feeding The Fire
10. Bleed
11. Sacred World
12. Shadows Of Deception [live] [Japanese bonus]
13. Praise The Rain [live] [Japanese bonus]
+ The Sentence [video] [Japanese bonus]

Griffin are a Norwegian Power Metal band, which is becoming pretty common these days, first with Guardians Of Time, and now Griffin, maybe a whole new wave of Norwegian Power Metal is ahead. This is the third Cd of the band, I must say that I'm not familiar with any of their prior works, and surely this release has been given little amount of promotion outside of Norway.

First thing that strikes me is the awful cover art, the booklet is very poor too, no much effort in this area?
The album starts, and the opener "The Sentence" fills my ears with a typical fast paced Power Metal song, with good riffing though, one thing that surprised me was the backing vocals in this song, done by no one else that Alexi Laiho, from Children Of Bodom fame, which happens to be also, the producer of the album.

The album goes on, and I found myself thinking, "I've heard this before a million times" in each song, with a couple of exceptions like "Praise The Rain" and "Weightless" 2 songs that I really liked, as for the rest of the album, well, I found it a little boring at times.

Luckily for these guys there are chances, because they have a problem of songwriting, not musicianship, as far as I listened, these are talented musicians, as a matter of fact, Kai Nergaard almost became the new guitarist in Children Of Bodom, but declined the offer he got from Alexi Laiho.

I'm sure that any fan of Power Metal will like this album, as for me, I'm a little tired of all the Power Metal bands spawning daily from every corner of the world, and I feel like I've already heard it all, maybe Griffin next release will prove me wrong, but until day, this record did anything for me.