May

The heavy, pounding style of their previous "Hakikat" effort continues in the opening "Racun Bermadu", another solid fistbanger all things considered, but I'm beginning to see a pattern here. They start out their albums on a mere 'decent' level, then gear up on abouts the 3rd track and finally explode on side B. Proving my point, both the following "Rahsia Kota" and "Black Area" are cool, riff-centric bangers despite being a bit on the monotonous side.

They make another another return to Thrash-light territories (a habit introduced on their last album) with B-side opener "Pahlawan Mimpi", a decent enough track in the Anthrax-meets-OverKill vein, and I guess "Batu Api" could also be shoehorned into that genre although it's a consistently mid-pace affair, great and all but perhaps once again suffering a bit from that same monotony-ailment as some of those A-side HM numbers. With only 2 tracks left we're sitting here crossing our fingers for yet another True Epic hymn - a style that we know they've mastered so bloody well in the past. Unfortunately the albums wraps up with the melodic hardrocker "Genggam Bara" (well, technically w/ another shit ballad but we don't count those as music here) and while it's no shameful dud of the genre it's still gives the album a sad-trombone ending in these ears.

This was the last MAY album to have been released on vinyl and the only one that was officially released with a full color sleeve. I would argue that it's also the heaviest one to date with an ever so small margin, but whether it's the best would be a matter of metallic preferences. At least 8 more studio albums were produced up until the early 00's and for the most part they continued this style of, perhaps not explodingly original, but honest Real Metal, when at their best with a healthy J. Priest "Painkiller"-vibe attached to them.