Band:	Loudness
Album:	Engine
Style:	Heavy metal
Release date:	July 1999

01. Bug Killa
02. Black Biohazard
03. Twist Of Chain
04. Bad Date (Nothing I Can Do)
05. Apocalypse
06. Ace In The Hole
07. Sweet Dreams
08. Asylum
09. Burning Eye Balls
10. Junk His Head
11. 2008
12. Coming Home

From the mother of japanese heavy metal bands Loudness (album The Birthday Eve released 1981) comes a real change of mind and thus a change of music style. The band was known to play classic heavy metal, but they somehow seemed to lose the fun in it along the way in the 90's and took another rather experimental direction. Engine is one of those experiments sounding like putting Soundgarden, The Doors and Nirvana on hard drugs and sending them to some oriental place to record an album, the result is Engine a partly very hard alternive heavy rock piece, not clearly distinguishable between alternative rock and experimental metal of the progressive kind.

The cover art already speaks for itself, regarding it you might think of either hippies or some crazy oriental rockers and somehow both got combined on this album. The spirit of metal not completely forgotten we have here 13 songs that have partly a psychedelic touch, partly you hear oriental melodies and in other parts you think of modern alternative rock or progressive metal. It's hard to tell if Loudness have decided to take the route back to metal in the meanwhile since they got back their old singer Minoru Niihara in 2001, because their albums are either hard to get or not very cheap. One thing you can tell about Engine, you should definitely keep your fingers of this record if you know and love their older stuff, because as mention this one is not as metal as it gets, rather an effect-filled freaky piece of music, very alternative and in parts quite oriental to ears from the west. Also the vocals are quite more aggressive with Masaki Yamada than they were back in the 80's, just like Mike Vescera produced some harder tones with his voice in the early 90's as well.

All in all I want to give this album 6 points, because it is not really metal anymore, but as mentioned the roots of metal have not been forgotten and these twelve songs plus one intro really make a difference from what I've known.