Crucified Barbara: The Midnight Chase

Mayhemic third album from femme-metal four-piece.

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Crucified Barbara’s 2005 debut In Distortion We Trust remains a gal-metal masterpiece, thanks in no small part to the Swedish band’s rampant enthusiasm and naïve audacity to compose songs with titles such as I Wet Myself.

Their third album, The Midnight Chase, is unsurprisingly and understandably a much more mature offering. There are a couple of generic tracks (Into The Fire is too Motörheady by half; Everything We Need is straight out of the Girlschool songbook), but these are more than counterbalanced by moments of genuine brilliance.

Star of the show is Mia Coldheart, with her guttural, strangulated singing style. But then she surprises the hell out of you with her oh-so-sweet delivery on the slow-paced Count Me In.

Portentous, giant-sized ballad Rules And Bones is the clear standout, the lyric ‘Crashing into the wall of mayhem’ summing up the spirit of the album perfectly.

Geoff Barton

Geoff Barton is a British journalist who founded the heavy metal magazine Kerrang! and was an editor of Sounds music magazine. He specialised in covering rock music and helped popularise the new wave of British heavy metal (NWOBHM) after using the term for the first time (after editor Alan Lewis coined it) in the May 1979 issue of Sounds.