Band:	Last Carez
Album:	First Caress
Style:	Melodic hard rock
Release date:	2008
A review by:	Bas

01. I Want Life
02. Vicious Circle
03. Down To Fall
04. Freak
05. The Chamber
06. Declaration Of Love

Hard rock is a style of music which I can enjoy a lot, if the band is good, but it's not a style that I listen to a lot? In other words, a hard rock band needs to be really good to manage to convince me. Well, guess what, here we have Last Carez from Germany, and they just manage to exceed in convincing me. Not only do the musicians know how to handle their instruments, but this demo here is also very versatile.

Starting with the dynamic hard rock track 'I Want Life' and then proceeding with 'Vicious Circle', which greatly reminds of the superb German heavy metal trio Rage, then the oh so catchy 'Down To Fall', the slightly alternative-influenced 'Freak' with its excellent refrain, the melancholic ' The Chamber' and to round it up the beautiful, romantic ballad 'Declaration Of Love'. Last Carez play around with a lot of different attitudes and sounds, and they make fantastic music with each of those approaches. All the members are already very experienced, which can be heard from the music, but the band itself only exists since a short while.

Where the lyrics are concerned, they have a lot of grammar mistakes in them, but what's more important, there are a couple of very good phrases, rhymes and ideas in them. For example the refrain of 'Freak' which I mentioned earlier; "Yes I'm a freak, I do what I wanna, I'm not too weak, to be unique!". Just gotta love it, seriously. However the band itself doesn't take all of their lyrics too seriously, which is good. The band itself also affectionately calls its music "women metal" (the band has a male singer though).

All in all we have some great songwriting here, very good musicianship, not bad to good lyrics as well and a lot of diversity. We even get a guest appearance by Edguy's guitarist Jens Ludwig. And as far as I care this might have been the first but hopefully not the last caress we'll get by this very promising German melodic hard rock combo!

Recommended to EVERYONE! (Especially to all women as the band itself suggests )

PS: You can listen to the complete demo on their Myspace site: http://www.myspace.com/lastcarez