Tower - Shock to the System

How it feels to chew 5 Gum

Were you, like me, devastated when Satan's Hallow broke up pretty much immediately after releasing one of the standout throwback speed/trad metal albums of the decade a few years ago?  Are you, like me, interested in Midnight Dice, the band that took shape afterwards featuring every member of Satan's Hallow except Von Jugel, but think they're missing some of the previous magic and are getting impatient with how long it's taking them to put out a full length?  Do you, like me, firmly believe that you can gauge a metal band's quality simply by judging how ugly the members are?  Then boy fuckin' howdy do I have a treat for y'all today.

While there's been no shortage of raunchy female-fronted throwback metal in the past few years thanks to bands like Solicitor, Crystal Viper, Sanhedrin, Savage Master, and others (not to mention more polished power metal entrants like Battle Beast having a pretty great run until recently), there's some primal intangible that Tower scratches like a spider bite.  To bring it back to Satan's Hallow one last time, Von Jugel once described the intention behind their sole album to be single-mindedly tight and focused, with nothing but ass kicking metal from front to back, not unlike a finely tuned opening set from the best local opener you've never heard of.  That idea is in the forefront of my mind when listening to Shock to the System.  This is 39 minutes of lean, mean, ball-shattering Heavy Fucking Metal straight out of the mid 80s.  I give throwback acts a lot of shit on principle because I prefer bands that bring their own flavor to the style instead of just ripping off classics and calling it a day, but if exceptions that prove the rule are a thing, then the fact that Tower was such an instant hit with me should show that they are exactly that.  This really feels like a temporally displaced Warlock album from their speedier era instead of a group of kids desperately wishing they were Warlock, ya know?

The Warlock comparison is pretty much mandatory considering the vocal stylings of Sarabeth Linden here.  Doro is pretty much the undisputed Queen of Metal at this point in history and her sandblasted howl is a huge reason why.  Linden follows in her footsteps by blasting the listener with the vocal equivalent to a flamethrower, but I'd wager she actually has more in common with the tragically forgotten Nicole Lee, who fronted Znowhite in the late 80s when they were secretly one of the best thrash bands in America.  Check out "Running Out of Time" for probably the clearest example of their similarity.  Linden has a very similar hint of shrillness (I know that's usually a negative but I mean it value-neutrally here) with her wild-out shrieking and fuckloads of vibrato when she really cuts loose that sets her apart from the flood of Doro-likes out there.  She sounds like she's flying off the rails and I love it, it's completely unhinged.  

While she's the highlight of the band for sure, Shock to the System wouldn't be worth listening to if the music underneath her vocal acrobatics weren't equally great.   Fortunately, Tower avoids the pitfall that Iron Griffin fell into and gave the vocal star some excellent songs to work with.  The majority of the album is awash in 80s sleaze and early metal tropes, but instead of being tired rehashes of 40 year old ideas, it's approached with the kind of creative verve that really only happens when the stars align.  Sure, a track like "Hired Gun" can trace its lineage directly to late 70s Motorhead if you really wanted to dissect it, but it doesn't feel like a Motorhead track, it feels like a Tower track, and that's very important for reasons I've repeated plenty by now.  One thing I really appreciate about Shock to the System is that it's unafraid to dabble in hard rock influences as well, instead of limiting themselves to the tropes that we exclusively categorize as "heavy metal" forty years later.  "Hired Gun" is a great example in the opening minutes, as are "Blood Moon" and "Lay Down the Law", the latter of which is pure arena metal cheese during the buildup.  What makes these touches magical, however, is how startlingly brief they are, as each and every one of those tracks I mentioned (along with the rest) inevitably climax with absolute teeth-shattering speed metal insanity.  This balance between hooks and intensity would be clinical if it wasn't so obviously covered in slime.  The overwhelming sense of pure fuckin' raunch is completely inescapable and I'd argue that it's crucial to the album's success.  I want my metal to sound fuckin' dangerous and that's exactly what Tower gives me.  "Blood Moon" kicks the album off with a nifty marching snare and a descending guitar riff that sounds like it could've been written by Steppenwolf, but it lasts a whole twenty seconds before Linden fires off the first absolutely deranged howl and the music abruptly shifts into high octane carnage.  It's so destructive and over-the-top that the first simile I thought of was "it's like a parade float with boosters and rocket launchers instead of t-shirt guns" and I almost didn't write that down because it's so stupid, but god dammit I seriously can not think of a better visual to describe the reckless enthusiasm on display here.

There's very little I don't adore about Shock to the System, and I can't recommend it enough for fans of older, less extreme styles of metal.  If there's any flaw, it's simply that "In Dreams" doesn't really sound like a seven minute long track, and man that's barely even a complaint!  What it lacks in ambition it makes up for in execution, and it's just a fantastic fist-pumping metal tune instead of a particularly epic one.  That's uhh... kinda it.  I haven't even touched on the smaller aspects like how much the solos melt face or how fucking great "The Black Rose" is, the whole experience is just nugget after nugget of unoriginal but extremely explosive Judas Priest style trad metal if every song was "Freewheel Burning".  And come on, does that not sound rad as shit?

RATING: 92%

Stalker - Black Majik Terror

Playing skittles with the heads of the French Aristocracy
 

This year has been weird for everybody.  I'm not gonna pontificate on all the havoc wrought by covid and such because I'm sure you've all experienced your own unique hardships, but for the purposes of a music review blog, I found a pretty big shift in my listening habits.  That whole Relitigating High School series wasn't just a shelved idea that I resuscitated to cure writer's block, it's also just where my music listening habits were for most of the year, seeking comfort and security in a past that I know already happened and didn't kill me.  As a result, near the end of the year as I do my yearly scramble to listen to everything that might be worth considering for my year end list, I've found myself shifting away from the more grand meta way I've been looking at metal.  Less brainpower spent on "Does this philosophically clash with the presentation?  Is this doing anything truly new?  How does the context of the wider scene affect this album's impact?" and much more spent on adolescent surface-level stuff like "Do these riffs fucking rule?"  And that's what leads me to today's subject, New Zealand's Stalker (there's an umlaut in the name but my stupid english keyboard doesn't have a button for that so you'll have to deal).

Black Majik Terror is the band's sophomore album, but their debut completely slipped past me despite being my exact jam purely because 2017 was jam packed with raucous throwback speed metal and they just slipped through the cracks.  In a much less crowded year, Stalker has managed to jump out of the darkness and punch me in the face with a force akin to a coked out Butterbean.  Taking a more surface level approach to music lately has helped Black Majik Terror spring to the forefront of my listening cycles because this is some of the dumbest shit I've ever heard.  There isn't one single heady idea, no new interesting or creative twists on an old formula, nothing of the sort.  This is tried and true speed metal with obscene tempos, ludicrous soloing, and endless tuneless yelping but it's played with so much fucking gusto that I can't fault it one bit.  This is the Zapp Brannigan of speed metal - all CHA with zero INT.  Apart from the brief moments of respite in "Holocene's End" and "The Cross", this is forty unbroken minutes of straight ahead downhill pummeling.  It's actually kind of hard to talk about because that's really all there is to say.  Tracks like "Intruder" and "Of Steel and Fire" are loaded with so many riffs and screaming leads that there isn't any way to really dissect them without disorienting yourself.  

This frantic lack of restraint calls to mind OG heavyweights like Agent Steel and Razor, and if you don't like Razor then when the fuck are you doing here?  The very nature of playing throwback speed metal gives them a pretty limited pool of influence to draw from, but I'd say they stack up against (and surpass) most of their contemporaries drinking the same juice like Ranger or Vulture.  I'd say they're most similar to Evil Invaders simply because they both ape Razor so hard, but in reality, the correct answer is Seax.  The big difference between the Kiwis and the Massholes is that charismatic intangible I mentioned earlier.  Both bands aim for pure speed above all else and include vocals that aim for raucous squawking and incoherently bizarre falsetto wailing, but Seax never really felt confident in doing so, instead just kinda imitating John Cyriis while being self conscious of how ridiculous it sounds, whereas Stalker's Dave King just strides out on stage with his cock fully out and makes eye contact with you while pointing directly at it while making noises somewhere between a deer mating call and Massacration.  It's so rad, I fucking love it.  It's the same reason I love Scanner's Hypertrace so much.  This kind of vocal approach lives and dies on the vocalist's ability to sell it.  In objective terms it sounds like ridiculous wailing, but in context and presentation it sounds like unhinged primal fury, and Stalker absolutely sells it.  I would trade my wedding ring for the vocal stems just so I can blast them out of my front window all day.

So yeah, Black Majik Terror is just pure speed and wailing and that's all there is to say about it, but conveniently that's all I want out of this style.  This is the exact opposite of "thinking man's metal" and I'm fuckin' here for it.

RATING: 88%

Hellripper - Black Arts & Alchemy

In league with the entire Ars Goetia

Hellripper is a good example of how to do a clone band correctly.  On the surface, James McBain's one-man project of pure devastation is commonly known as "The Midnight of Scotland", and that isn't wrong, but instead of sounding like a hollow shell of that American monolith of throwback viciousness, Black Arts & Alchemy is every bit as wild and frenzied as any other band in the current scene. 

This kid knows what he's doing, because Hellripper is the exact kind of beer-and-hash-soaked demonry that bands like Midnight and Whipstriker have been making popular in recent years.  This kind of Venom-cum-Motorhead-cum-Onyourface is just a god damned blast and I'm cool with bands aping this sound as shamelessly as possible for the foreseeable future.  There's very little here beyond the surface flash of high octane 70s Motorhead put through the filter of virgin sacrifice and bloody sodomy and fuck that's all I want it to be.  This is primo caveman metal, with no greater goal beyond simply rocking the fuck out as hard as possible and breaking as many faces as possible on your way through.  These riffs sound like a Harley doing a burnout on your face, what the fuck else do you want?

There isn't much to dig into considering that, even beyond being very simple black/speed metal in the vein of early Venom, it's only a four track EP.  "All Hail the Goat" starts off sounding like a biker bar on fire and it never slows down from there.  All four tracks sound pretty much the same but they all fucking rock so who cares?  It's fast, high octane metalpunk with the speed and energy of early 80s German speed metal and it sounds exactly like how you're imagining it to sound.  My only regret is that the digital promo doesn't include the fifth track, a CD-only bonus track cover of Running Wild's "Iron Heads".  If you don't know why that will inevitably being the banger of the fucking century then I don't even want to know you.

For what it's worth, the first five times I tried to listen to this, I'd get about halfway through the first track before iTunes would crash.  Black Arts & Alchemy is so vicious that it kills technology.


RATING: 93%

Vulture - The Guillotine

I dunno, whadda YOU wanna do?

Vulture made a lot of waves last year, but I'm just gonna skip to the punchline and say that the general metal listening public has really short term memory, because this is rethrash to the bone.  Remember when thrash had that resurgence in the late 2000s and was immediately flooded with tryhard losers who put on a thrasher costume and ripped off the same two or three bands until everybody got sick of them?  Well Vulture is exactly that.  A little better than most of them thanks to the heightened Razorisms, but still guileless, inoffensive thrash that's way to proud of itself simply for being thrash.

Thrash as a genre isn't exactly ripe for experimentation, so I tend not to hold it against bands for being unoriginal (I loved the shit out of Condor last year and they're just Aura Noir reincarnated), but I guess the reason that Vulture irks me enough to write about is because The Guillotine itself doesn't really do anything interesting within its own runtime.  You get the gist of the album with the first track and then basically hear it repeated seven more times with diminishing returns.  "Vendetta" starts off with an ominous piano/string intro, building a pretty solid sense of foreboding, before just exploding forwards with hyperspeed riffs out the wazoo, rife with ear piercing falsetto shrieks and shredding solos.  Then the following seven songs all do the exact same thing, give or take the quiet intros.  The immediate comparison I could think of was Evil Invaders, if a little bit more on the thrash than the speed metal side (but only barely) except not quite as exciting.  The wild soloing is there, but it's not quite as ferocious or over the top as their Belgian contemporaries.  The vocals are primarily made up of frenzied shrieking, but it sounds more like a calculated crutch (quite literally every single song features a double tracked "ooooooooooOOOOWYAAaAaAaAaAAAH" screech) whereas Evil Invaders sounds more like they're fronted by a dangerous lunatic who can't control or restrain himself in any way.  I don't want to keep comparing them to another modern band but it's hard when every single aspect of Vulture that could be great can be so easily improved by simply looking a few miles towards the western border.

So Vulture is a thrashier variant of classic speed metal in the vein of Razor and Exciter, so you figure the two areas where they'd absolutely excel would be speed and intensity nearly by default, and in truth they only truly succeed with half of that.  There's no doubt that The Guillotine runs along at a ridiculously high tempo, with even more midpaced sections appearing in tracks like "This Night Belongs to the Dead" cruising along at warp speed.  The problem is that there's very little beef behind the riffs.  They're all lightning quick but carry little of the inherent devastation of their meteorological point of comparison.  The riffs that make up these songs are all flashy and zip by nearly instantaneously with their enviable quickness, but there's to accompanying thunder to them.  They happen and then they're over, they're cool but have no lasting effect.  Usually with albums that have this issue, they can work to make up for a lack of riffing prowess by blowing the listener away with some other aspect, but as previously mentioned, they don't really do that either.  The soloing is quite good but sounds obligatory, if that makes sense.  The vocals are wild and crazy but land a little too close to the terrible vocals you'd find on third tier nobodies like Dismantle.  This sort of "I can't actually sing but I can snarl and do the 'Angel of Death' intro" works a little better with this more melodic style, but it can still be grating.  He does occasionally belt out a scream that sounds more frothing and insane (most notably at the very end of the album, closing out "Cry for Death") but it's not nearly often enough to keep me interested.

All in all this is an exceedingly average album with a few neat moments that spends far too much time repeating itself to really break out.  Probably my favorite intangible when it comes to metal is "danger", and there's very little that's actually dangerous about Vulture.  They're fast and... not much else.  They don't sound all that powermad or frantic or chaotic or anything, they play by the rules of their chosen genre and only add tongue waggling speed to the mix without a solid base of excellent riffs to hold the whole thing together.  So it's whatever.  I have no ending for this review.

Screw Flanders.


RATING - 55%

QUICK HITS: Ranger - Speed & Violence

Last year, I managed a paltry 20 reviews for the entirety of 2016, five of which were mostly pre-written pieces for the Gospel of Gargoyle series that I swear I'll finish some day.  Frankly, I have all kinds of stuff to talk about but very little of it can be stretched into the lengthy essay style I've made my trademark over the last nine years.  So in an effort to get back into this reviewing game I adore so much, I'm breaking from the 1500+ word style that I've gotten too comfortable with, and I'm bringing back my short, one paragraph blurb style reviews that I would occasionally crank out back when I first launched this blog in 2011.  Back then they were called Bite Sized Reviews, in an obvious ode to my love affair with chocolate.  They are now named Quick Hits, which is not actually a weed reference, but instead a quip about how utterly broken the skill is in Final Fantasy X.  Shove me in a locker, please.

STAAAAAND BY FOR EXCIIIITAAAAH

The latest group of shameless throwbacks to land on my radar, Helsinki's Ranger, are pretty much the exact kind of creatively bereft loons I've always secretly loved.  Speed & Violence barely contains more than three original notes strung together in a row but it's such an unapologetic blast of 80s nostalgia that I can't help but love it.  Ranger specializes in early speed metal, but less the German kind that evolved into power metal like Blind Guardian and Running Wild, and more the Canadian variant that evolved into thrash metal like Razor and the band's chief influence, Exciter.  There are some smatterings of early Slayer as well, with "Satanic Panic" basically being the most obvious knockoff of "Black Magic" I've heard in eons.  Despite the overwhelming deja-vu offered by the album, it's such a bucketload of fun that I don't really care all that much.  Speed & Violence doesn't present itself as anything other than exactly what it says on the tin.  It's fast, loud, and rude and that's all it needs to be.  You look at that low budget album cover and you already know you're going to get semi-tuneless wailing over relentless double bass and non stop riffage delivered at 200mph, and that's exactly what you get.  It's high speed cheese and nothing else, and while that's certainly enjoyable, it does get old and generally lacks in any real staying power.  That's the album's sole downfall, it does what it does so well that it just makes you want to go put on Heavy Metal Maniac or Executioner's Song instead because at least those albums have already proven themselves to be timeless classics instead of shameless copies of themselves.  So yeah, it's a fun listen but it doesn't have a whole lot of use beyond just reveling in how much fun the music was way back then.  It is, by it's very nature (and the exact reason I chose it for the first of these short reviews I'm going to start doing), a quick hit.


RATING - 75%

Scanner - Hypertrace

EVEN TIIIIME IS STANDING STILL

I've mentioned before that German speed metal is pretty much unequivocally the greatest short lived subniche of the entire heavy metal family tree, and despite my raging fandom for it, I've never been exactly sure which album to recommend to somebody who has no idea what it sounds like.  Running Wild's seminal Gates to Purgatory is far and away the best album of the style in my eyes, but it's a weird starting point because the lyrical focus stakes itself firmly in the grimy satanism of Venom, while the runner up album, Helloween's Walls of Jericho, fits all the themes and hits all the tropes, but it always felt like an album of two or three magnificent songs and a bunch of merely good ones in accompaniment.  That's why, after six seconds of deliberation, I have decided to bestow the title of "Absolute First Fucking Speed Metal Album You Should Ever Hear" upon Scanner's 1988 debut, Hypertrace.  Why you ask?  Why not something a little more obvious and relatable like the first couple Blind Guardian albums?  Well that's easy.  Scanner may not be as good as Blind Guardian or Running Wild, but let me tell you, they are ten trillion times more awesome.

Really, nothing makes me giddy on the level of a seven year old after his twentieth Oreo like a high speed, spacefaring concept album narrated by a coked up wolverine possessed by the spirit of Udo Dirkschneider caught in a bear trap.  Seriously, I raved for eons about how much I loved the unhinged ridiculousness of Bride's vocals, but Scanner tops even those.  Michael Knoblich's glass shattering wail is used about as liberally as Nutella in a hipster's studio apartment, and I love it.  It's never been a secret that I think subtlety is overrated in the context of metal, and I'm much more prone to loving the shit out of something shamelessly fun and ridiculous.  Hypertrace is that in spades, it's just non stop speed and over the top wailing and blistering fretwork from the get go and it basically never lets up.  But again, none of that matters, listen to the vocals.  They're so over the top ridiculous, so full of overt cheeseball silliness that I seriously can't decide if he's playing it totally straight, stoically imposing his will on the stage like the vocalist of Belphegor while wearing a Terminator mask and Deathworld suit, or if he's this little ball of energy, bounding around everywhere, shooting his toy laser gun into the crowd and swinging the microphone stand like a noob Kilik player, belting his heart out so hard that blood squirts out of his eyes before he passes out at the end of every show with a six foot wide smile rigor mortis'd onto his face.  They're so perfect, I want Knoblich to sing to me on my birthday.  LOCKED! OUT!  uuuWAAAaAaAaAaAAAHH!

So yeah, I could write forty thousand words about how fucking perfect the vocal performance is, but the music and songwriting is pretty much spot on phenomenal as well.  There is basically no album opener as great as "Warp 7" in all of metal.  Really, for the blast of energy it provides, coupled with how obnoxiously infectious it is, it rivals something like "Painkiller" or "Exciter", and most of the album follows suit.  "Terrion", "Locked Out", "Grapes of Fear", "Wizard Force", basically every single song is a high speed burst of enthusiasm that manages to be as ear catching as any 80s anthem.  Despite how fast and over the top the album is, it never actually seems "aggressive", so to speak.  It's not sinister or vicious, it's just fucking fun.  From the explosions and corny sound effects that are sprinkled throughout the album, to the fist pumping singalong monuments, everything hits bullseye in a way that most of their peers would kill to achieve.  Despite the over the top speed taking up a large portion of the album, there are definitely spots where the band shows they aren't afraid to slow down a bit to show off their songwriting skill.  Nothing here really approaches a ballad, per se, but songs like "Killing Fields" and "Across the Universe" tone down the barnburning ridiculousness in favor of arena deafening anthems that are no less over the top and entertaining.  Both of the aforementioned songs have some of the best singalong moments in all of speed metal, rivaling the mighty Blind Guardian in terms of catchiness and complexity.  Early Manowar, despite being kings of this kind of thing, still weep at the fact that they never wrote anything as indisputably immortal as the chorus to "Across the Universe".  So my claims of nothing but non stop speed are slightly facetious, as the band does an excellent job of throwing in an abundance of Screaming for Vengeance-isms.  Despite the variance in tempo and execution, it's never anything less than Evel Kneivel level over the top bombast.  From the screaming guitars to wailing shrieks of the greatest vocalists to ever take the stage, everything is the musical embodiment of a wild haired scientist jumping the entire width of France in a rocket powered Star Wars speeder.

So basically, Hypertrace can be summed up as "charismatic".  It's a goofy sci-fi concept backed by over the top theatrics and a vocalist who sells everything by singing ridiculous nonsense with as much conviction as anybody ever has.  Everything that comes out of his mouth just sounds like the MOST AWESOME THING EVER and I can't find myself arguing against it.  In the grand scheme of things, this was sorta lost in the shuffle and Scanner never reached the heights of Helloween and Blind Guardian, despite being every bit as magical.  The only reason I can think of for this being the case is simply that they were a little late to the party (Speed metal of this specific niche only lasted what, five or six years?  It was basically gone by 1990 and Hypertrace came out in 1988) and missed the intangible of being "influential" instead of just "amazing".  Maybe if they'd've transitioned into full on power metal as their career went on like the genre progenitors did, they'd be remembered by the general populace as one of the greats.  But as it stands, they're just a cult classic, known widely by the people who matter and basically nobody else.  And really, that's probably the way it should be.


RATING: A MILLION TIMES GALE FORCE TEEeEeEeEEEEN

(but really, 97%)

Judas Priest - Painkiller

The best can suck it, THIS is what I'd rather hear

Oh lord, another glowing review for Judas Priest's foray into the heavier side of metal.  Let's face it, the praise isn't thrown this way on accident, this is a beast of an album.  There is one thing I'd like to address before I even really get down the grit of the review here, and that is that Painkiller is NOT Priest's best album.  Not at all, I'd never claim otherwise.  Sad Wings of Destiny, Sin After Sin, and Stained Class are all better albums from a musical standpoint.  The holy trinity of S albums in the '70s carry a monstrous wealth of musical depth and complexity that Painkiller can only dream of reaching.  The dynamics and vocal acrobatics are completely otherworldly and quite ahead of their time.  I mean really, how many straight up heavy metal bands, that can still be classified as such by today's standards, were there in the mid '70s?  Priest wasn't only in a league of their own, but their seminal works of the time still  hold up today as absolute milestones of songwriting.  Painkiller can't claim any of those technical landmarks as its own, not at all.  It's nothing but big stupid speed metal riffs and mindless double bass.  But honestly, given the choice, I'll pick Painkiller every single time, without even hesitating.

Perhaps this makes me a dullard, but god damn I'd rather hang out with the cavemen than the physics professors if this is how they party.  This album is a perfect example for dissecting the difference between an album being "the best" and "my favorite".  Some examples, like Megadeth's Rust in Peace, are both my favorite and what I would also consider the band's best work.  But Priest is different, they completely fucking nailed it early on and only got dumber as time went on.  This, to me, seems to be their zenith.  This is the perfect combination of retarded silliness, the leather and rock n' roll attitude of their '80s era, and the modernization of their music with heavier, faster songs and a much more aggressive approach.  I mean look at the album cover.  That ridiculous image right there sums up this whole album perfectly.  It looks like Silver Surfer finally got his wings and then celebrated by stealing Wheel Gator from Sigma's Fortress.  If that one-two punch of nerd references was lost on you, I'm sure you can still just look at the damn thing and see how over the top and silly looking it is.  It's the perfect visual representation of what you'll find underneath.

The album begins with the title track, which probably still, after all these years, ranks as my #1 most favorite metal song of all time, across all subgenres.  There's nothing wrong with it, this is Judas Priest working out some immeasurable amount of pent up anger and aggression, and the addition of drummer Scott Travis shows its merits right away as the album begins with a moderately short drum solo.  It's fast, it's pounding, it's double bass out the wazoo, and it shows what Priest is now capable of with this young fellow behind the  kit instead of the droning, mustachioed kiddie fiddler of Dave Holland.  Once the song itself picks up, Rob Halford also shows off his pipes in a way he hasn't done since the glory days of those magical three S albums I mentioned earlier.  Some of the passages he belts out are amongst the most heartfelt and agonized of his career, you can really tell he's giving it his all on this record.  At not one single moment on the entire album does he sound content or laid back, he is always a snarling, raging beast behind the mic and is determined to scare off all of the infidels in the area.  The title track also contains some of the best soloing that heavy metal has ever witnessed, the legendary Tipton and Downing team are also completely on top of their game here.  They shred like they never have before, pushing themselves to the limit and beyond, which is quite remarkable considering Tipton was well into his 40s at this time. 

With all of the band members pushing themselves so hard and possibly even trying to outdo each other, the whole album carries an inescapable frantic pace.  Even the half ballady track, "A Touch of Evil", carries a sense of urgency unlike anything the band had ever done.  In a way, this is kind of like the Judas Priest counterpart to Anthrax's Persistence of Time, which came out around the same time.  Both albums are the band's darkest and heaviest works to date and were a result of outside factors and tension within the band.  On tour for this album, as we all know, Rob Halford managed to wreck his motorcycle onstage, which somehow acted as a catalyst for him to essentially give the band the finger and walk away, thus ushering in the oft maligned Ripper era of the band.

And again, that tension and aggression shows itself throughout the duration of Painkiller.  "All Guns Blazing" is one of the more violent tracks in their repertoire lyrically, and the title track, "Leather Rebel", and "Metal Meltdown" are all completely balls out speedfests.  "Between the Hammer and the Anvil" and "Night Crawler" are both sheer heavy metal anthems with catchy choruses and huge, hard hitting riffs.  This is abundant in the one element that I always felt the '70s era lacked, fun.  This is one of the most fun albums in heavy metal history, and while this is overblown and idiotic, I never feel like going out on a Friday night and cranking Sad Wings.  This is over the top, headbanging fun and there's no other way I'd rather have it.  This straightforward speed metal is something that Priest apparently completely rocks at, and even though they never really expanded upon the sound found here, it's still an everlasting testament to what makes Painkiller so damn awesome.  It was a glorious one-off in an already glorious career.  The internal strife and pent up frustration with the band members resulted in some of the most high octane music heavy metal as a whole has ever put out, nothing gets the blood pumping quite like throwing on "Metal Meltdown".  It retains their '80s signature of being incredibly infectious while providing the goofy AOR anthems with a much needed shot in the arm. 

And that's what makes this close to being the perfect album in my eyes.  It's a magnificent mixture of everything that made the band so noteworthy up to this point while also keeping it fresh and interesting.  The aggressive style really works with Priest's songwriting skill and Painkiller is absolute proof of it.  I'll be the first to admit, despite my vigorous masturbation, that this is a flawed masterpiece.  The album loses steam at the end, with "One Shot at Glory" not being quite as big, over the top, or anthemic as it wants to be and preceding the kind of disappointing ending with the ballady track really seems to give it a weak back end, but in the context of the entire album it's just a quirk that I don't think brings the album down all that much, if at all.  You'd still bone Marilyn Monroe, regardless of whether or not she's got that mark on her face, and I'd still bone this album, even if it does have that mark on its butt.  I still recommend this to every newcomer who seems interested in metal, to every jaded veteran who for some stupid reason hasn't heard this, to anybody with a pulse who seems to realize music exists, really.  I write love notes to this album weekly, and this time I decided to publish it.

Call me!


RATING - 100%

Running Wild - Masquerade

Master ride!  Hiding in Bangkok!

For OG fans of mine and long time review readers at the good ol' Encyclopaedia Metallum, y'all may remember that I used to have about six or seven reviews for Running Wild up there, and then them all mysteriously disappearing around the time Rolf decided to hang up his robe. What had happened was that I decided to review each and every album in a tribute to my favorite band, and in reading my own reviews, I decided they all sucked and just deleted them instead. Well two years later here, I'm finally getting around to making good on my promise. And instead of some long winded series like I had planned, spanning their career chronologically, I once again decided against my initial wishes and instead figured it'd be best to just do them in whichever order comes to me.

Now that my self referential, expository masturbation is out of the way, we're gonna start our journey with one of the more controversial albums in Running Wild's catalogue, 1995's, Masquerade. If any average listener were to explore the vast, wonderful backlog of the German speed metallers' exploits, they might be hard pressed to explain why this album is such a big deal to so may fans of the band. Well for some reason, a few folks (idiots) seem to feel like this is the album where they fell off the wagon and began to stagnate. There aren't enough words in the English language to accurately express how much I disagree with that sentiment. One reason I've been given is that this album marked the precise point they ran out of ideas and just started ripping themselves off senselessly. The truth of the matter behind that is that this is simply a continuation of the style they were playing on Black Hand Inn, which was a continuation of Pile of Skulls, which was a continuation of Blazon Stone, et cetera and so forth. Running Wild had this amazing ability to write albums that didn't sound too different from one album to the next, but worlds apart if you look back a mere three or four albums. They were always changing, ever evolving, and this is one of the traits that made them such a special band. Why this particular album catches shit for doing what literally each and every album before it had done, I'll never understand.

Master ride! Evil is dumb!

So to counteract my claim of logical continuation, this is also the album where Rolf starts reaching back and combining past efforts with his new ambitions. For example, tracks like "Soleil Royal", "Black Soul", and "Wheel of Doom" could have easily fit on Black Hand Inn with their similar riffing ideas and slight power metal tint at times, whereas "Men in Black", "Demonized", and "Rebel at Heart" carry a more hard rocking and traditional heavy metal bent than the others, sounding akin so something that wouldn't be out of place on Blazon Stone, and still we have tracks like "Underworld", "Lions of the Sea", and "Masquerade" that are straight up speed metal through and through and really would have sounded right at home on Pile of Skulls. So yes, I can concede that Masquerade explores less new territory than previous efforts, but I counter that it's a beautiful amalgam of what made the last three albums, (and really, their entire 90s era) so great, while still pushing forwards into new territories.

Really, every trademark of Rolf and crew are still just as mighty as ever, no matter what people may try to tell you. They lyrical concept is a bit different than what fans may suspect, as this album kicks off a trilogy of "concept" albums, so there's less piracy and history here in favor of some obscenely loose concept of rich people being evil and controlled by Satan or something. Really, nobody knows what the hell the idea is, but there's supposed to be one here, and if my little between-paragraph gimmick hasn't been clue enough, Rolf's hilarious accent doesn't make things a whole lot easier. I've listened to each and every Running Wild album more times than I care to recount, and there are still several, several verses and passages I don't know the lyrics to simply because his voice, despite a great gruff delivery with a powerful sense of melody, carries such a mangled understanding of how to pronounce damn near anything in English that it's fairly close to impossible to decipher what the hell he's saying most of the time. This is just one of those bits of character that really makes the band so legendary, if you ask me. Nobody can imitate Rolf's voice nor his unique enunciation, it belongs to THIS band and no other.

Master ride! Trees in the night!

And speaking of which, this is indeed a band, and not just Rolf + cronies. I've alluded to the contrary in the past, but the supporting cast always does bring their own little bit of flavor to each new record. The long, melodious bass passages vanished with Jens Becker, and the drumming has gotten considerably more intense since the mighty Jorg Michael took his place behind the kit. This is the first album where the lineup did not change in anyway from the previous album, so perhaps that's another reason certain fools seem to feel the band started stagnating around this time. Just because there was no new member to inject his personality into doesn't necessarily mean that they all just got content with where they were and decided to churn out an album just like the previous because that's what they're used to. Black Hand Inn was and remains the closest to power metal Running Wild ever got, in my eyes. On Masquerade, there's a much stronger traditional heavy metal presence. There's much less double bass insanity, and much more fist pumping, anthemic choruses with huge, punchy riffs. The trademark tremolo melodies are here in spades and every bit as upbeat and catchy as they have been ever since Port Royal shoved them to the forefront. On the whole, the entire atmosphere of this album is much darker than pretty much anything they'd done apart from their debut up to this point, with a much more aggressive pace than before. Many of these songs focus on the idea of evil and its many forms, and while this isn't dripping with the malice and occult of their first two records, it contains some of the most overtly vicious venom they've ever come to spit.

I will admit that the album slows down a bit too much when the band takes their foot off the gas on tracks like "Demonized" and "Rebel at Heart", which are still good songs, but don't much fit with the high energy tempo of the rest of the album. I've always found this to be Running Wild's Achilles heel, to be honest. The tracks that are less speed metal and more traditional/hard rock never seem to be as captivating, regardless of how awesome Rolf makes the chorus (like "Rebel at Heart"). It's really only a small bump in the grand scheme of things, fortunately. I can't help but feel like the popular opinion of this being the band's turning point is completely and utterly wrong. Every element that made the band special is still abundantly clear and the biggest difference between Masquerade and the fan favorite of Black Hand Inn is that the former is more direct and less epic. Whatever story is being told here takes a back seat to a collection of hard hitting and exceptionally catchy heavy/speed metal, and that's exactly what Running Wild is best at. I wouldn't change a thing.

Master ride! Punish the Hebrew rite!

RATING - 91%

Stormwarrior - Stormwarrior

Tope Notche Mediocritye

Welle, whate doe we have here? Ae Germane speede metale bande withe Kai Hansen'se approvale ofe awesomenesse? Thate hase toe rule righte?

Okay, first off, the whole gimmick with adding an "e" to the end of every word is exceedingly stupid and needs to metaphorically suck out farts and die. I'm not marking down points for that, that would be retarded. It's not detrimental to the music, just really fucking annoying.

Now, superficial vent aside, let's get to the subject of the review, Stormwarrior. About twenty seconds into the first song, I proclaimed out loud "twenty bucks says they're from Germany", and I was right. The German speed metal sound is a very distinct one, and is one of the only styles that one can immediately identify the geographic location of a band upon hearing them. Frankly, I love that sound, but Stormwarrior has taken worship to the extreme. As much fun as this album is, there is not a single original note throughout the entirety of the record.

The one word that best describes Stormwarrior's self titled debut is "Deja-vu". Not one riff doesn't sound like something you heard on Walls of Jericho almost twenty years prior. Usually this is a good thing, but this is blatant, unimaginative worship on an almost Trivium-esque scale. This doesn't sound as much like a throwback to the good ol' days of 1985 as it is undoubtedly attempting to be. Instead, it sounds like a cover band, albeit a very good one. Deceiver might as well have been named "Murderer", as it's the same goddamn song. Even the vocalist sounds EXACTLY like Kai Hansen. Jens Carlsson sounds nearly identical to Hansi Kursch, so why do I lambast Thunder Axe for sounding nearly identical to Kai Hansen? Because Persuader actually accomplishes something that Stormwarrior merely attempt yet sadly fail at, writing orignal, creative, and unique songs.

As if it wasn't bad enough that this was essentially a half assed attempt at writing Walls of Jericho part II, they decided to take their unoriginality to the next level by having Kai Hansen produce the album, contribute a solo or two and some backing vocals, and even cover Heavy Metal (Is the Law) with him singing! Jesus man, I guess if you can't hide your blatant plagiarism, you might as well have the original writer endorse it eh? I really don't see what people are talking about when they say that Stormwarrior "puts an original spin on the old style". What original spin? There is none! The music (which, mind you, is what actually counts) sounds like every early/mid eighties German speed metal record sounded like. I'm sorry, but changing the lyrical subject matter from fantasy or pirates to vikings does not make one a creative individual. Stormwarrior is to Walls of Jericho and Gates to Purgatory as what The Crusade is to Master of Puppets.

Now, despite all this negativity, this isn't actually a bad album. As the title states, this is top notch mediocrity. They do nothing original, but they do it extremely well. Even though this is pretty much 50 minutes of rehashed Helloween and Running Wild riffs/melodies, it's still a fun experience the first time through. The album definitely loses it's touch after a couple spins, but some songs (Deathe by the Blade, Signe of the Warlorde) are honestly excellent songs. The production is excellent, the musicianship is great, and when you really think about it, all of the elements to a great album are there... the only lacking quality is originality.

This album was tailor made for early speed metal fans, but it's only an amazing album if you can look past the glaring unoriginality. On the whole, it's a decent record. It gets boring by the end due to a very severe lack of variety, but again, it isn't terrible. I would say that Kai would be disappointed with a band trying so hard yet failing to capture the magic that he emanates, but apparently he's so proud of this band that he made sure he blew his load all over the album. So a D+ to Stormwarrior. It's a fun record on the first spin, but that's about it. Every last song sounds like the one before it, which all incidentally sound like something we've all heard a million times before.

RATING - 68%