Barely a year has passed since the release of Rage's last album "The Devil Strikes Again". As a result, and as we could expect, the little new "Seasons Of The Black" looks like its predecessor. So we came back to a heavier, more direct Rage, ignoring the past symphonic experiments. A less technical Rage as well, which is not necessarily a bad thing as long as the quality is there.
There aren't really any ultimate songs in this "Seasons Of The Black", there aren't really any bad ones either: the whole is quite homogeneous. Some tracks stand out a little bit like the excellent 'Justified' which appears in the mini concept album "The Tragedy Of Men". It's actually a kind of sequel gathering four tracks that tell a little story, as the band had already done a bit in the past on "Welcome To The Other Side" and especially on "XIII" with "Changes". The sequence 'Serpents In Disguise' - 'Blackened Karma' - 'Time Will Tell' shows that Peavy still has a lot to offer when it comes to composing catchy choruses. It doesn't sound crazy original, but the band deliberately wanted to go back to something simpler and more direct and they succeeded.
Several editions of this album are available. In the "deluxe" version there are several tracks of Avenger (the first name of Rage*) re-recorded. If you don't know these tracks, it's the occasion or never to fill this gap because they are quite recommendable. 'Adoration', for example, even today hasn't aged a bit.
(*) Fun fact about Avenger. It was the boss of their label at the time (NOISE Records), the controversial Karl Walterbach, who asked them to change the name of Avenger to Rage because he was afraid of competition from the English band with the same name. So Peavy and his friends found a new one: Furious Rage, and it's when they saw the album in the stores that they realized that the label had purely and simply d Furious to keep only Rage.