IGNITOR - Roll The Bones
by Martin Popoff

Power metal can really suck. But when it's done right, done with a bit of dirt and determination gained from a life in the metal trenches, and yes, with just a little bit of realization about the stupidity and futility of it all - of everything - well, you feel good and rocked like it's the thick of the NWOBHM all over again.

Ignitor guitarist Stuart Laurence knows this feeling, and when he drinks too much to lose grasp of it, he pulls out his bullshit detector to help him out of a tight spot. The result is a sword-clashed, scraping, biting and true metal album called Road Of Bones, which... well, cross Helstar from the first two records with Icarus Witch and you're sort of bullet-belted to the hilt. And I never thought I'd be saying this (we're talking "eat my hat" terrain), the female vocals out of Erika are totally so kick-ass metal, I don't even want to hear a guy in her goodly stead. She rules.

Oh yes, one other thing: Laurence sports pedigree that among these parts is legendary, esteemed, godly, namely that of guitarmanship in the surreal Agony Column, start to finish, from God, Guns & Guts through Brave Words & Bloody Knuckles, through to an album even Laurence isn't sure, to this day, was ever "released" (long story).

Hell, even the igniting of Ignitor is a long story, or at least a silly one. "After Agony Column went away, me and Charlie, the drummer, started a recording project, that was kind of a punk rock thing," says Stuart. "Actually, what the deal was, I was just listening to The Donnas at the time and I thought they were cool, so Charlie had the idea, let's make a fake band, had him in to play all the music, and he got this girl who we worked with who had this little squeaky voice to sing on it, and then we would play it to different people and tell them they were 13-year-old girls. And the funny thing was, every guy would say, 'Are they hot?' (laughs). 'Yeah, but are they hot?' So that was that, and then Charlie, because he's a crazy drunk, he booked a show, and I said to him, 'Well you know, this isn't a real band, dude.' And we actually made it into a band, and that band was called T.A.N.G., and T.A.N.G. actually played around for a couple years. Eventually Charlie quit, and that's when Pat Doyle joined the band, and when Melanie quit, it just sort of seemed like it was kind of a dumb idea to begin with, and maybe if we want to continue to be a band, do something that was actually cool - something what I wanted to do. So I proposed that we start a power metal band, and everybody agreed, so that's really kind of how Ignitor started, from the ashes of T.A.N.G., and then at that point, we worked on coming up with all new material."

IGNITOR - Roll The Bones Page 2