Tribunal’s sister label, Divebomb, specializes in reissuing obscure and almost forgotten thrash and hardcore albums, and for that, we salute them. So confused was I going into this that I thought this fifth offering from Oklahoma’s FORTE was actually a reissue of some unheard album from the mid-’90s. But this is on Tribunal, not Divebomb, and this is a brand new studio disc from this long-suffering group of thrashing mad power/trad metallers. Forte never really got into the upper echelon of metal bands back in the ’90s, but they were certainly talented enough to. The problem always lay in the defiance of categorization, the tunes operating in a middle ground between balls-out traditional metal, soaring power metal, and slightly technical, barbed-wire thrash attacks. Here, it’s the same ol’, with the band totally capably and without any red cheeks doing what they do best, all these years later, still sounding incredibly tight and razor-blade vicious, and still fighting off that slight fatigue that sometimes comes with operating in a vague space between genres. But, overall, a good release that can easily give most of today’s thrash/power/trad big names a run for their money.
