NIGHT ON BRÖCKEN

Fates Warning would eventually become standard-bearers for 80s progressive metal, but their debut album shows no signs of the innovations or complexity to come. Instead, what we have here is some fairly simplistic metal clearly heavily influenced by Iron Maiden, to the point where John Arch seems to be trying to sound like Bruce Dickinson most of the time. However, at this point in time the band's compositional chops were nowhere close to Maiden's, leaving the songs here pale imitations of the sort of material their great inspiration was coming up with at the time. It's competently done, but there's little reason to give this one a spin if you've got Number of the Beast, Powerslave or Piece of Mind handy.