Falcon’s Easy Prey is another one from the New Wave of British Heavy Metal days in the 1980s re-discovered by those top people at Obscure NWOBHM Releases and put out on one of their limited edition CD runs of 500 copies.
Falcon formed in the mid-1980s with the bulk members previously being the backing band for an “electro-pop” act by the name of Mirah. Anyone?
A well-received three-track demo was made which seems to have been rather popular in Holland with Falcon bagging a deal with Guardian Records and recording an album. The story goes that the deal was never signed due to a fire at the studio which affected the master tapes and the album not issued as a result.
Now almost four decades later, the tape has somehow been unearthed and repaired/remastered resulting in Obscure NWOBHM Releases issuing the album as Easy Prey.
A fine listen it is too. Nicely heavy with melodic overtones with some very nice shredding backed up by big, chunky rhythm guitar.
A note from the booklet does mention that: “There was significant deterioration of the tape which contained flutter, hiss and audio phasing. While most of this has been improved, still some artefacts remain. We like to think of them as battle scars.”
That said it doesn’t detract from the listen nor take away anything from what a promising band Falcon were. On Easy Prey we have ten excellent well-paced, heavy and melodic tinged NWOBHM with that lead work particularly impressive.
Check out the title track as an example:
All Through the Night is another excellent hard/melodic rocker with more first class soloing and the monster rhythm guitar.
Well, the whole album is. Falcon sure knew how to write good stuff and were it not for that studio fire and Easy Prey had been issued as intended back around 1985 who knows where it may have taken them? Yet another of the many, many talented NWOBHM-era bands for whom things didn’t fall right.
As I mentioned at the start of this post, it’s a limited edition of 500 CDs. As I type both the label and Sonic Age Records show availability:
https://sonicagerecords.com
https://onreleases.bigcartel.com
Obscure NWOBHM Releases have been busy issuing this and also (if you remember them) similar from Titan (review here) and Denigh (review here) in short order. Wonder which NWOBHM band they’ll do their stuff with next….?