Apostle – Hymns

Apostle
Hymns
1988 (no label)
Jacksonville, Florida, USA

Matt Harding – All guitars, vocals
Ray Schmidt – Bass
David Paul McKee – Drums

Side 1:

1. Hymns
2. Vanguard
3. Dragon Slayer
4. I Am Persuaded
5. The Sword

Side 2:

1. Unlimited Power
2. Split the Sky
3. Waiting
4. Holy Soldier

Sometimes it is a bit hard to tell the different Apostle tapes apart. They are all really good power/classical metal. But they also tend to have the same format: start off with an instrumental keyboard song, blast into a metal song with vocals, shred away for a total of nine songs. Hymns seems to be different from its predecessor Chariots of Iron. It starts off with three instrumentals before launching into a song with vocals. The second and third instrumentals are full band. So a totally different format… 🙂 I’m kidding, of course, but it does make it seem like you have an instrumental album for quite a while. They really do this style of metal well – I can see why people always want to see these demos released on CD. To my ears, these songs sound a bit rougher than the ones were later re-issued on the Chariots of Iron / Hymns cassette in 1994, so these songs were probably remixed or maybe just remastered for that release. After this tape, there was a self-titled release in 1989, while Matt Harding also went solo with Matt Harding’s Steel Armada also in 1989.