Metal Maniacs Magazine Coroner Grin April 1993 by Don Kaye

The fifth album from this long-laboring Swiss trio throws a curve at traditional power metal and comes up with some interesting ideas. Ron royce (bass/vocals), Tommy Baron (guitars), and Marquis Marky (drums) create a sound that's crisp, heavy, yet oddly elegant at the same time.

If Grin suffers from anything, it's the album's length. The strength of the music gets more sporadic as the disc grinds toward the sixty-minute mark, so it's the early numbers that work best. A brief, eerie intro, "Dream Path," leads dramatically into "The Lethargic Age," which barrels along on killer riffs and catchy vocals from Ron. "Internal Conflicts" is also instantly gripping, an industrial-tinged dirge that sets its own oppressive athmosphere.

As the album progresses, Coroner drifts away from tight songs and get into jazzier, more freeform experiments like "Paralized, Mesmerized." However, their music is good but not captivating enough to develop so many different themes over the course of seven or eight minutes. The band ultimately sounds best on the more compact material.

Coroner have been staking out their own little niche, somewhere between power metal and progressive rock, for some time now. While parts of Grin can be an acquired taste, the band's creative approach to metal is their best feature.

Reprinted without permission from the Superstar Special edition of Metal Maniacs magazine, vol. 11, issue #1, April 1993.

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