Last month a pleasant surprise wasd added to my Hardrock/Heavy Metal collection: the new CD from the German Band Sinner. This month we turn the black red and yellow flag 90 degrees and we find ourselves in Belgium, in the city Brugge to be precisely. From Brugge comes After All. These 5 guys make music that is also easy to categorise as Heavy Metal. Although I must say After All’s Heavy Metal is Metal with a Hardrock edge adjusted to it. After All has a touch in their music that is the opposite from most of the Heavy Metal nowadays. They don’t sound as all the Hammerfall’s and Rhapsodies from this moment. The band doesn’t play only fast and light. Of course they have these typical fast up-tempo songs like ‘Beneath The Flesh’, ‘Rectify’ and the very catchy one ‘Black God White Devil’ (a cover from La Muerte), but with songs like ‘Crave For More’, ‘Descending Pain’ and ‘Twist Of Fate’ the put a lot of variation in the tracklist. ‘Crave For More’ is a slower, more heavier song and it’s not a happy one. Lyrics like “Going down in this f**ked up world” speak for themselves. ‘Descending Pain’ is the obligate ballad. BUT….fortunately it turns out to be a ballad I enjoy listening to. The song clocks over 7 minutes, but every time when I hear this one it seems like it is shorter. After All put enough changes and tempo breaks in this track, it never gets dull and there even is a surprising start: producer Harris Johns plays the Blues Harp (mouth organ). ‘Twist Of Fate’ is the strangest track on this album compared to the rest. This song is pure Doom Metal. In another magazine they described this one as Candlemass. I would prefer to talk about Black Sabbath meets Trouble. All these ingredients mentioned plus a playing time of 45 minutes, a big variation in the length of the tracks (I left some good shorter songs unmentioned) and a clear production by Harris Johns (Kreator, Voivod, and the mouth organ) recorded at The Spiderhouse Studio in Berlin make this CD very enjoyable to listen to. In a special sentence I would mention singer Piet Focroul. It is difficult to describe his voice. Like the music he also sings with a Hardrock edge adjusted. He doesn’t sing extremely high, he doesn’t scream like hell and he has no long shouts, but he doesn’t sing bad at all. He knows what he can do and what he can not do, so he sings within his limits with his normal, not overworked voice. To me, that is something almost new nowadays. The lyrics are mostly about relationships, and here the band again has done something different. I mean, it seems like Heavy Metal at this moment is almost only fantasy lyrics. At ‘Mercury Rising’ the band has also put 2 bonus CD-rom videotracks. You can see the band simply playing live in the rehearsal studio. Funny. Last but not least I have to give a note of credit for the cover (it looks like a picture from the comic book Storm) and for the picture’s and layout. All in all After All produced a good Heavy Metal album.