First seeing the cover thou would thinketh thou had just bought Witchhaven or Thief II the Metal Age. ‘Tis not the case. No, this object contains music. Normally I pretty much hate music with medieval looking CD covers, and therefore I had very low expectations of MVP. Those ex-pectations were pretty much obliterated after hearing the album for the first time. Outside of the earlier mentioned downsides, MVP’s The Altar proved to be an awesome album. The Altar is the third solo CD of Michael Vescera, whom I didn’t know before. MVP thus stands for Michael Vescera Project. Vescera has been lead-singer for the band Loudness and has been the singer of Yngwie Malmsteen for two albums. He is said to be quite a famous person in the old-school metal scene. Personally, I didn’t even know that this type of Megadeth-1984-high-pitched-singing-metal existed anymore. Listening to ‘The altar’ is an hour well-spent.

It takes you back to the 80’s, the days of Head-banger’s Ball, when people wore ugly, really tight black pants, with matching too short T-shirts with stupid band names on them. When you put this CD on, you expect knights walking in any minute. The music has good melodic rhythms which even stick with you. The guitarplay is flaw-less, with many awesome and sometimes inimitable solo’s. Vescera’s vocals go fantastically with the music, although sometimes they can be a bit cliché (‘On our way to hell’, rrright). The drums are great as well, with some really nice double bass drum bits in many songs, always good. All and all this album, which also contains lots of guest appearances by astute guitarists, is worth your money, definitely. In fact, don’t buy whatever clothes you were planning on purchasing, in stead, buy this album, it’d be a worthy addition to your collection.