Thursday, December 18, 2025

Ambassador - Living & Dying (1998)

 
Cost: $3.00

This looked like it had potential and I was excited to listen to it, but unfortunately it ended up being very meh. Calling this straight-up power metal like Metal Archives is a major oversimplification at best, although the music contains enough semblances of it where I suppose it's not totally inaccurate. 

After the intro, the first track delivers somewhat thrashy power metal, although as it progresses it picks up some chunkiness and stop/start groove metal riffage. Then "Open Your Mind" is straightforward groove metal, and "Feel My Rage" retains some grooviness, but it's tempered with more melodic elements and feels less prominent. The closing title track probably has the best guitarwork of the disc, although it comes off as a mishmash of various power, heavy, and thrash metal elements (with choir keyboard effects) than a cool cohesive song. The opening riff even reminds me somewhat of the intro to Van Halen's "Ain't Talkin' 'Bout Love."

The vocals are one of Ambassador's lower points. Often more weak than outright bad, they're only a few steps above being an accented speaking voice most of the time. On the plus side, despite the groove metal influences, there are never any aggro vocals.

The drum sound is the other negative point. I didn't take any great notice of the drumming on my first playthrough of the opening track, but the second song has extremely artificial sounding drums. After listening through the whole CD, I think it's safe to say an electronic drumkit was used for the whole thing, although it's not nearly as prominent as on track #2.

Usually even amateurish demos and indie releases can have a particular charm, and to a certain extent, that's the case here too. But ultimately, there's not anything particularly memorable here. 

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