LovingBorn

Listening to LovingBorn's sophomore effort "Insaf" for the first time, I don't think I've been as fooled by a beginning of a Metal song since hearing "Fast As A Shark" at the age of 12. While keeping the melancholy of the magic debut, the first acoustic minute or so is the most gentle moment yet by the band, and when the track finally explodes it razes through you with the force of a titanium-plated pterodactyl armed with gatling-lasers! Locally, only the mighty ROCKERZ would come close to this fierceness in the way of remorseless Power-riffing and choruses and the alternating between these thundering bursts and the acoustic parts now makes perfect sense. There are probably less than one hundred songs in Heavy Metal history that I would truly give a 10/10 rating. LovingBorn made 2 of them, one of which is this incredible title track. Many a great band made none.

The rest of the album is also pretty good.
Nah, in fact it's often straight up awesome, like in the following "Legenda Pemain Bola" that straddles the fence between slow, atmospheric Doom and epic semi-ballad perfectly. They clearly have retained the impressive ability from their previous album to write slow, exotic and deceivingly 'soft' songs instead of shitty prefab schmallads, but as much as I enjoy both "Rayuan Hati" and "Ku Kehilangan" I do feel a bit starved for faster and heavier material towards the end of side A. "Mencari Sinar" delivers with a vengeance by presenting us some truly original and unique Southeastasian Steel. It starts off relatively conventional, almost sloppy, like some charming, Maiden/NWOBHM-inspired European demo-act and then makes a 90° turn and makes a crazed Beduin-charge over the Sahara desert on the chorus, then goes Heavy hopping mad for half a minute in the middle and then starts over again.

Sadly the rest of the album never quite reaches the height of the 3 gems on side A, but the fact that I'm even bothering with reviewing one of these (VERY common) type of Malay albums where the real HM tracks are in minority should tell you something of its overall quality. "Kehidupan" sounds awfully upbeat for a full minute before it finally settles like a more than solid and quite clever number. This and the last representative of the Steel proper here, "Perwira Bangsa", follow in the same footsteps - great, moodfilled Metal with melody rather than its easily misinterpreted 'Melodic Metal' counterpart. However out of the 3 remaining ballads, only "Masihkah Aku.." reaches the level of their previous material in this cathegory, but MAN that's a great fucking song..

Btw, if you should ever come across what looks like a normal picture sleeve version of this album, be aware that this is one of several old Malaysian promo vinyls known where fans have printed and distributed their own color sleeves among themselves. Sure, it looks nice, but remember kids: Only original pasted MC sleeves are trve!