When Birmingham's Marshall Law ended a three-year silence with the impressive Law in the Raw live album, not too many fans actually expected a bona fide reunion to materialize. But that's exactly what happened when the long dormant group unleashed 1997's descriptively titled Metal Detector album, which convincingly resurrected Marshall Law's traditional metal sound as if they had never gone away in the first place. Melodic metal offerings like Twisted This, War, Feed the Need, and the cryptically named Devices strive for metallic perfection as ever before, and even if they ultimately fail to leave a genre-busting impression in their wake, there's no faulting their well-meaning intentions. The concept of power (though not power metal itself, strictly speaking) has been a constant throughout Marshall Law's career, and after applying it to two of their prior releases (1991's Power Crazy EP and 1993's Powergame LP), the band saw fit to revisit it on one of Metal Detector's strongest cuts, the insistently engaging Empowerment. And they also score another victory with the increasingly addictive, quite commercially viable Seek and You Shall Find, but, needless to say, chart success was simply not an option for either Marshall Law or their modestly financed label, Neat Records. Original fans were probably quite happy with Metal Detector's contents, however, and would only have to wait a couple of years this time before being presented with the band's next effort, 1999's Warning from History. [This edition contains bonus tracks.] ~ Eduardo Rivadavia, Rovi

1		Osmium
2		Twisted This
3		War
4		Seek and You Shall Find
5		Swarm
6		Feed the Need
7		Devices
8		Addicted to the Pain
9		Empowerment
10		The Sands of Time
11		Meganoid
12		The Seeds of Change
13		Iridium
14		Storming the Power