Label: AFM Records
Release date: 11/18/2011
Production: Piet Sielck
Album length: 49:11 min
Genre: Heavy Metal / Power Metal
The new album from German power metallers Iron Savior comes along like it was ordered to fix the bad impression Helloween and Grave Digger have been leaving lately with their most recent studio efforts. Just before the new Iron Savior record, Brainstorm had already done a solid job wiping away that bitter aftertaste with an excellent new album, and “The Landing” is yet another example of a record made exactly the way it should be made when we’re talking about Iron Savior.
Iron Savior are a lesser-known name on the power metal scene, which has been around since way back in 1997, when Piet Sielck got things rolling together with his buddies Kai Hansen (Gamma Ray, ex-Helloween) and Thomas Stauch (ex-Blind Guardian). With his persona and his work, Piet Sielck is thoroughly intertwined with the careers of Helloween, Gamma Ray and Blind Guardian alike, and he played an important role in the early steps of all those bands, with ideas, as a producer and as a co-arranger. So he’s a guy who today belongs in the league of “metal sages” and sort of gurus of German power metal.
All of this shows on the new Iron Savior album, the first in four years since “Megatropolis” (2007). In the riffs and the way the songs are put together, you can’t miss a similar musical sensibility to the one typical of Gamma Ray, and occasionally Blind Guardian too. The riffing itself is what recalls Gamma Ray, with that signature harmonic picking over the riffs, while Sielck’s vocals are what remind you most of Blind Guardian (even more so when backed by vocal harmonies). He doesn’t have the flexibility of range or the articulation of tone that Hansi Kürsch (Blind Guardian) has, but he keeps up a tremendous power, just what’s demanded by the unstoppable riff usurpation resting on vampirically rolling double bass drum pedals.
After a four-year break, Sielck has served up an album of perfectly dressed power metal marches that you really can’t take anything away from or add anything to. Anthemic feel, epic bombast, atmospheric peaks in the chorus melodies, wonderfully venomous, jagged, primordial riffing that springs from the true old Teutonic school of metal, the kind they’ve always brewed in Hamburg and its surroundings. You can’t find power metal that sounds more steely and classic, in the strict German mold, anymore.
Even though the stylistic resemblance to Gamma Ray is at times downright startling, you have to let it slide here, since the band’s career path has been tightly interwoven with Gamma Ray from the very start. Drummer Thomas Nack was Gamma Ray’s drummer in their early days, that is, in the first half of the nineties, and Kai Hansen played in Iron Savior, as did his Gamma Ray buddy Daniel Zimmermann. As expected, the album opens with an intro that builds the atmosphere step by step until it all spills over into the “Accept-style” sharpened The Savior, an excellent choice of opener that instantly kicks off a real adrenaline rush, a hormonal cocktail in your bloodstream, and true power metal fanatics will automatically start windmilling their heads.
The production is excellent and lives up to everything Euro power metal demands at its best! The riffs are venomously cranked and pushed up front, the vocals command them with vehemence, determination and authority, and the rhythm section is optimally contrasted, with the bass guitar lines nowhere near trampled by the stomping of the double bass drum barrage, which has often been the Achilles’ heel of power metal albums in the past. Speaking of comparisons, songs like Moment In Time and the album’s fastest track Faster Than All (the name says it all) are what comes closest to old Gamma Ray, while the “gem” Hall Of The Heroes has a little riff surprise in the opening that recalls the epic Grave Digger classic The Round Table. R.U. Ready stands out on the album as a rock-‘n’-roll “loosened up” track, where the verses run through a string of thank-yous to the giants of rock music, without whom Piet Sielck and company would have a hard time imagining today’s metal in all its varieties. Another track that stands apart from the rest is the calmly balladic Before The Pain, which isn’t exactly what we’re used to from Iron Savior, but the main thing is that it’s stuffed with solemn bombast and excellent choices in picking and combining lead melodies, so it works fully on the album and as such keeps its credibility intact.
“The Landing” is an incredibly mature new studio album from Iron Savior. I’d go so far as to say it’s one of the best things this band has ever put out in its career. Simple as that. Routine, miles on the clock, know-how and experience. Add to that the long break between the previous album and this one, which left plenty of time to pick the best new ideas and finalize them just right! That’s why this is a new Iron Savior album that’s sworn from head to toe to the band’s core musical vocabulary, yet at the same time sounds fresh and destructive, and as such effectively keeps the ideal balance between the epic bombast of grabby melodic hooks and ultra-high-voltage metal punch. All you power metallers have to check this one out.
author: Aleš Podbrežnik
rating: 9.0 / 10
Tracklist:
01. Descending (1:05)
02. The Savior (4:48)
03. Starlight (4:51)
04. March of Doom (4:43)
05. Heavy Metal Never Dies (4:14)
06. Moment in Time (5:07)
07. Hall of the Heroes (5:39)
08. R. U. Ready (4:49)
09. Faster than All (5:03)
10. Before the Pain (4:34)
11. No Guts, No Glory (4:31)
Lineup:
Piet Sielck – vocals, guitar
Joachim “Piesel” Küstner – guitar, backing vocals
Jan-Sören Eckert – bass guitar, backing vocals
Thomas Nack – drums, backing vocals
