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This project should be a disaster waiting to happen: a gathering of musicians and vocalists from disparate bands is a recipe for a disjointed, confused collection. However, the opposite is true.

Metal Allegiance is a credible, thunderous album, spanning thrash and power metal. Every track stands alone as a reflection of those involved, but there’s an overall cohesion.

Opening with the whiplash blur of Gift Of Pain, featuring vocalist Randy Blythe from Lamb Of God, the intensity never slackens on a series of fiery performances from the likes of Phillip H. Anselmo, David Ellefson, Alex Skolnick, Mike Portnoy and Cristina Scabbia.

What works is that Metal Allegiance might have a different line-up on each track, but a consistent sound comes through against all the odds. This is not a vanity project to fill the time for bored stars, but one of the year’s best metal albums.

Malcolm Dome had an illustrious and celebrated career which stretched back to working for Record Mirror magazine in the late 70s and Metal Fury in the early 80s before joining Kerrang! at its launch in 1981. His first book, Encyclopedia Metallica, published in 1981, may have been the inspiration for the name of a certain band formed that same year. Dome is also credited with inventing the term "thrash metal" while writing about the Anthrax song Metal Thrashing Mad in 1984. With the launch of Classic Rock magazine in 1998 he became involved with that title, sister magazine Metal Hammer, and was a contributor to Prog magazine since its inception in 2009. He died in 2021.