Tiktaalika – Gods of Pangaea

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• Band:
  Tiktaalika
• Duration: 00:53:22
• Available from: 03/14/2025
• Label:

• Inside out

Let's face it, “Gods of Pangaea” is not a heap of haken waste, nor an alternative version of the speech carried out by the English group over time; Rather, it is an artistic outburst, with a little nerd, with whom Charlie Griffiths, guitarist of the British group, delights us for three years now.
The Tiktaalika steals the name of the first solo album of Griffiths, who in 2022 surprises all by revealing the love of its creator for groups such as Megadeth, Metallica and Annihilator, and it is precisely the influence of the Canadian band that permeates, like a spectrum, the fifty -four minutes of the new work in which the vision of the 'Riff Lord' Jeff Waters seems to be peeking at each juncture.
The sound, rhythmics, solos and artificial harmonics of Griffiths 'guitarism', in fact, do justice to the lesson that Waters has learned to Thrash Metal since 1989. The result of this inspiration materializes in an orgia of rocky riffs with a strong musicality played with impeccable technical skill, time changes and memorable refrains, dominated by vocal lines, Characterized by varieties in writing and modulations, sometimes also close to the alternatives with a thousand rock and metal shades of Creed and 3 Doors Down of the late nineties and early 2000s.
The merit, of course, is also of the varied parterre of guests involved in the realization of the album: to the bassist companion of the Haken Conner Green and Darby Todd (drummer of Devin Townsend), the singers Tommy Rogers (Between the Buried and Me), Vladimir Lalić (Organized Chaos) and Daniël de Jongh (Crown Compass) are joined again again. Also present on the previous album, with the novelty of Rody Walker of the protest The Hero to shine in the surprising “fault lines”, which combines an easy melodic chorus that is easy (almost from a ranking) with an instrumental construction that does justice to the aforementioned thrash metal influences.
From a conceptual point of view, the album resumes from where the previous one had stopped and continues with the exploration of an ancient planet, very different from the anthropocentric world that we live today; The same name Tiktaalika follows that of an aquatic species experienced in the late Devonian, approximately 375 million years ago, considered a vital connection between fish and four -legged vertebrates, all set in Pangea, the supercontinent of the earth that began to fragment 200 million years ago to gradually form continents as we know them.
Just as the last time, Daniël de Jongh's uvula lends itself to the service of the most techno-thrash songs of the lot, specifically “Tyrannicide”, “Gods of Pangaea” and “Give Up the Ghost”, halfway between the most groove Annialars and the mid-2000s. Sevenfold of “City of Evil”); Vladimir Lilić, on the other hand, is invited to give depth to the most cadenced songs of the lot (“The Forbidden Zone” and “Mesozoic Mantras”), showing off a multifaceted vocality to there Tim “Ripper” Owens.
A little out of place compared to the context is, perhaps, only the sung of Tommy Rogers on the epic groove/prog metal of “Lost Continent”, but the “chicxulub” instrumental bonus track takes care of reporting the work on the tracks of excellence, and in fact, wanting to find a defect in this compendium of Thrash Heavy Metal played in a workmanlike manner, we point out that the latter. Song he could have found a place in the official scaletta of “Gods of Pangaea” instead of the previous one.
On closer inspection, the Bonus Track is present in all digital versions and cds of this metal monolith, therefore the official sound tail of a complete, varied and surprising sound tail is to be considered, which for executive complexity and technical choices seems to want to pay homage, in the end, the album that has uncovered the Pandora's vase of the nascent vein of the Technical Thrash, the legendary. “… and Justice for All”, recalled, albeit only conceptually, since the beautiful cover. The protagonist of the artwork is not this time the statue of justice, but a Catholic minister who seems to have possessed by a demon that came out of a film by Sam Raimi: a mefistophelic referee on the ground of divine agiustizia, for an image to be hanging on the wall in the best iconographic tradition of the metal of the late eighties.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8q4ojetgece