Style: heavy metal, black metal, death metal
Label: self-released
Year: 2010
Home: Los Angeles, California
Members: Charlie Zeigler ~ vocals/drum programming/keyboards
Horace Miller ~ guitars/bass
The Miltants second release gives a bigger picture to their metal madness. Looking only at their first release One Nation Under Death one is apt to get the picture that this is just another brutal death metal band screaming & stomping about anarchy, Satan & general destruction. While a title like Fuel The Aggression doesn't exactly deter such conclusions. But, at the same time, it would be a premature conclusion. The Militants, the duo of founding members singer/songwriter Charlie Zeigler & guitarist Horace Miller on the album & expanded into a quartet for the stage but since this release completely retooled by Zeigler with a new line-up, do continue their in-your-face scream & stomp as much as they did on their earlier release. Zeigler still sings with a guttural throat approach typical of so much black metal. But, he's also one of the better singers as so many so-called singers have trouble separating melodic growling from just obnoxious & annoying screaming. Behind him guitarist Miller pours across the fretboard with Pantera-esque riffs full of lots of complicated flourishes leaving quite large & challenging shoes for his successor to walk around in ... it doesn't help the challenge that he gets lots of opportunity to shine holding down the entire guitar sections on the album with both rhythm & leads. While Fuel The Aggression suffers, like One Nation Under Death, from the lack of a separate rhythm section, though the programmed drums & overdubbed guitars do make the loss nearly unnoticeable even in the face of a rather small range of musical variety on most tracks. So far the Militants do hold to the metal stereotype but if one goes a bit deeper, beyond the bubbling roar, into the lyrical content composer Zeigler shows himself using the fierce headbanging motif to share his ideas about social disruptions & the future of the world. The title track "Fuel The Aggression" isn't so much a call to anarchy but a call to social awareness, alongside other similar hearkenings "Echoes Of Evil", "Rise Against Oppression", "Ethnic Cleansing" & "Time Does Not Heal". This is not music for the sensitive eared, whether listening to the music or what's underneath it, for "we are the people of tomorrow's revolution", as Ziegler sings in "Rise Against Oppression" & the people want something better & metal is the chosen tool of the revolution.
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