It’s been six years since the excellent “Babylon” and Blackie is back with another good album with a “biblical” title that has it’s own Golgotha to climb in order to match the band’s two previous great releases.
“Golgotha” kicks off in the same vein as the last two with a song that sounds like both “Crazy” and “Mercy”, the two opening tracks for “Babylon” and “Dominator” respectively, which is called “Scream”. From then on the main difference of “Golgotha” is that the musical orientation leans less towards heavey metal and more to hard rock. There are several great songs here and you’d pick them up on the first spin of the album. These are “Miss You” and “Slaves To The New World Order”. The first is the album’s ballad and the first long on duration and huge in emotion, while the second one is a classic W.A.S.P. tune that starts with an intro, the tempo climaxes, there is a break and it concludes in an anthemic way. There are more good moments in a high quality album. As usual the title-track is a highlight and on “Golgotha”‘s case it’s about Jesus Christ…
Sure, there are two songs there that I wouldn’t miss if they weren’t there (“Shotgun”, “Hero Of The World”) and there were a couple of others in order to make the final nine of the album keeping the overall quality in the highest level possible. Still, the album’s worth is not affected by those two. I think that “Golgotha” will satisfy W.A.S.P. fans, even though it’s a notch lower than “Dominator” and “Babylon”. What’s more important is that Blackie has left behind the mediocrity of the early ’00s and keeps writing great material that grants the band’s 15th album a place among its good releases. I honestly hope that the next one can break into their best!
