Review of the Album Through the Valleys of Hell by Greek Thrash Metal Band Horus Legion

Horus Legion is one of the several Greek thrash metal bands that have made it onto the scene in the decade of the 2010’s. Their debut album called “Through the Valleys of Hell” I saw as one of the recommended videos by the giant video site YouTube and I decided to review it because I have been into Greek metal bands in the month of September 2019. Horus Legion was previously under the name of Abnormal Deficiency from 2010 through 2016.

At first listen, this album feels like a mix of the bands Witchery and a little dose of Kreator but my goodness these vocals have the ability to destroy any goodness or redeeming quality the album may have and where do we start? The vocals have tons of repetition of certain words. They feel like they are the forced raspy kind of vocals and that’s never a good recipe for success. The vocals are hardly understandable and this one quality may drive lots of metal fans away but if I’ve been able to tolerate this album the first time through, then it must not be that bad. With the vocals of this album being as sub-par as they are, Horus Legion have really diminished their chances of becoming considered an elite thrash metal band as the vocals can have a major impact on the quality of the songs. “Before the First Dawn” has the sound of rain, wind, and just acoustic guitar. The vocals are of a whispering nature as there is a laugh in this song too. “Mind Construction” has this sort of feel that makes it sound like the early days of the German thrash metal band Kreator as even I hear the influence of Mille Petrozza in the vocals here. “There” sounds like a more modern version of Exodus with Steve Souza inspired vocals here. The middle section of this song is kind of exotic and decent so there’s at least one thing that Horus Legion does right for being a new band. The title track even though it has some of the worst vocals ever has a good exotic riffing part mixed in there. And that riff is kind of something that the band Buried Dreams used in their album called Perceptions but this album is nowhere even near as good as that one is. The song World War 3 sees the vocalist try to imitate Sabina Classen but it just doesn’t work. The band makes up for this deficiency by including a good solo with an ...And Justice for All inspired kind of riff mixed in.

Overall, this debut by Horus Legion has its good and solid moments musically but it suffers from one of the poorest vocal performances as the vocals are just kind of raspy screams that are hardly understandable. The reason why this album doesn’t get a below average score is because the riffing and melodic structure fits the modern era of thrash metal and the band at least intended to not make this album all about speed. The beginning of this album with that mostly instrumental playing with the whispering vocals could have been a promising start for this “newer” band but they ruined any chance of a brilliant thrash metal album by presenting vocals that are so bad that they probably wouldn’t be acceptable to most music producers.

However, Before the First Dawn has good acoustic guitar with the wind blowing which most people can hear this as a sound effect in the song.