Metal Underground.com

From time to time all the devil worshippers out there need to take a break from turning the fat of un-baptized babies into candles for this week’s black mass and just kick back with a beer or twelve. If the music that fuels that booze-soaked good time just happens to be put out by famous Norwegian black metal musicians, then all the better. Shagrath of Dimmu Borgir takes up the guitar duties and teams up with Bjorn Luna of Ashes to Ashes on bass and Eddie Guz on vocals to create “Doomsday Rock ‘N Roll,” an album that will probably spur more than one person on to buy a Harley and get in a bar fight.

It shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise that people famous for their atmospheric and evil metal bands would want to do something more old school, considering how many of them are children of the 70’s. Most of the originators in the scene grew up listening to Black Sabbath or Motorhead instead of anything resembling today’s more extreme bands. Speaking of Motorhead, the band’s front man belts out gruff and dirty vocals along the same vein as Lemmy or Roddy Stone of fellow beer rockers Viking Skull. By the time the album is done the audience will be wondering if he warms up his vocal chords by smoking a whole carton and then downing a bottle of something with a high enough alcohol content to come with a flame-retardant cap. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that philosophy of singing, however, as the crowd hearing the music should be wasted enough by the time the final track rolls around that they sound the same.

The guitar and drum work purposefully avoids anything menacing or ominous and instead sticks to the more fun areas to get people jumping around and taking shots. The focus of the album is clearly less on heavy atmosphere and more on having a rocking good time, as nearly every song has a catchy chorus for a crowd to sing along to en masse. A simple phrase like “Rock and Roll” doesn’t really do the album justice though, as the term here is referring to style and not to substance. The album has the feel of old school rock and roll while still very clearly maintaining its footing in the heavier metal sound.

“Serial Killer,” “Hate,” and “Trouble With the Law” are easily the songs most worth the cost of admission. Their lyrics and guitar riffs both pay homage to the famous and iconic hard rock bands while putting their own biker metal twist on the formula. The other songs are generally all good on their own, but they lack the stand out nature of those three tracks. One of the few down sides of the album happens in the self-titled track “Chrome Division.” It’s never a good thing when a band has to say their own name in a song like they’re in a rap group that gets regular radio play. If the audience can’t remember who they are listening to that means the band needs to change something in their formula, not have a song solely designed to ingrain their name in the listener’s subconscious.

Chrome Division’s debut album has the fun loving atmosphere and classic lyrical themes that will attract the hard rock crowd but it’s still heavy enough to please the real metal fans. While the follow up album “Booze, Broads, and Beelzebub” would take the base of “Doomsday Rock ‘N Roll” and refine it to an even better level, there is still plenty of reason to pick up the band’s earlier work and crack open a couple of cold ones.