Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Artist: Primal Fear
Label: Frontiers Records
Released: 2007
Duration: 54:00
Rating: 3/5
There’s no need to waste a lot of words on Primal Fear. They’re a very good band, especially when you catch them live on stage. When it comes to album releases, Primal Fear are seriously prolific. We practically get a new studio album from them every other year. Since the release of “Seven Seals” (2005), not much career-shaking has happened to the gents from the Stuttgart area, apart from the fact that they left Nuclear Blast and switched to the Italian label Frontiers Records.
“Seven Seals” confirmed that Primal Fear were getting pretty wrung out and could no longer serve up anything really fresh. The feeling that the band was putting out albums one after another too fast turned out to be spot on. While “New Religion” was being made, we got some very encouraging news about grand plans and loads of creative energy buzzing around the studio during the recording. And the result?
“New Religion” is definitely a different beast from its siblings. How much of that is down to Frontiers Records’ general fondness for signing melodic hard rock bands, I don’t know, but the hint makes sense, and it gets even more convincing given that with the move to Frontiers, Primal Fear have gone exactly in the direction of softening their aggressive, “straight in your face” German take on Judas Priest-style “heavy metal”.
We’re witnessing the introduction of symphonic, orchestral elements into the band’s rough and raw standard sound. Primal Fear have dabbled in that since their very beginnings, but never as intensely as on “New Religion”. That way the guys at least partly patched up a predictable template, one that anyone familiar with their records can crack on the very first listen. It would all be perfectly acceptable if Primal Fear had passed their exam with a merely passing grade. The first flaw that bugs me through all this is the raw live sound coming from the production work of the band’s bassist Mat Sinner on the album. It keeps the two elements feeling incompatible: the direct, riff-driven punch and the prettiness that the drama of symphonic arrangements brings. It feels like handing a clumsy giant the job of putting together a 1:72 scale plastic model plane, and then watching him crush everything he touches with those thick fingers. Primal Fear are simply too much of a bunch of brutes for this kind of tinkering. In this case it would have been far better to stay loyal to the standard musical direction and keep smashing away, furiously and convincingly, as metal rightfully should, with their usual standards, which do deliver a high level of quality, despite the repetitiveness and self-replication we’ve been witnessing from the band since the album “Nuclear Fire”.
“New Religion” holds up in its novelty-injecting through the fifth track of the album. The opener Sign Of Fear doesn’t yet hint at a shipwreck. By the band’s standards it’s a thoroughly typical heavy metal killer, with the excellent Ralf Scheepers in the dominant role, walking out of the ring as the absolute winner. In Face The Emptiness we run into the first bit of experimenting with the sonic image of the rock-solid metal figure that is Primal Fear. The curtain of synthesizers in the background does widen the spectrum of the band’s overall sound, but at the same time you don’t get a sense of compatible interaction with the other elements of the sound (the riffs, the rhythm section, Scheepers’ killer vocals). The song is rescued by the high melodic catchiness of the chorus. The highlight of “New Religion” is, by past Primal Fear standards, downright contradictory. It’s the punchy ballad Everytime It Rains. The song gets pulled back from a possible disaster by a guest spot from Simone Simons (Epica), who with her girlish, angelic-gothic approach and a touch of fragile fervor and longing takes the initiative and steers the listener entirely toward herself. We also get electronic samples, or rather special effects of that kind, meant to create the mood that the point of this song is supposed to deliver. It’s an element that could put off all the “true” metalheads, and one that in this case is boldly integrated into the song. The title track New Religion returns the band to its signature double bass drum torpedoing, Scheepers’ authoritative vocals and the famously white-hot riffing. The centerpiece of “New Religion” is the eight-and-a-half-minute mini-epic Fighting The Darkness / The Darkness / Reprise, which is in many ways a stretched-out recap of Everytime It Rains. The middle instrumental section strolls through a successful union of symphonic orchestral moments and riff-driven devotion to the metal religion. From there to the end of the album, though, Primal Fear in no way manage to justify the novelties they bring to their sound with the new record. One of the factors that would be absolutely necessary for the symphonic side and the metal directness to bond more effectively is, without a doubt, a different, somewhat more sophisticated production.
This time around, Primal Fear simply drown in an incompatible mix of melody and aggression. An example of great silliness, and the moment after which “New Religion” heads steeply downhill to the end, is Blood On Your Hands with its horrifyingly incompatible pre-chorus and chorus, while the last nail in the album’s coffin is hammered in by the literally Bosnian-sounding chorus in Too Much Time. On top of that, closing on the monotone note of empty dreams with the six-minute, dragged-out, softened-up ditty Man (That I Don’t Know) is a completely wrong choice.
So most of the time it all gravitates, in a negative sense, toward castrating the band’s trademark uncompromising aggression and toxic voltage, which they’re otherwise capable of generating when they push all their metal might to the front. Primal Fear work best when they play the pure power card. The element of roughness, raw directness and relentless attack, usually magnified so characteristically through Sinner’s production, is something “New Religion” fails to bring out. “New Religion” is a Primal Fear album where you’ll be swaying along to softer tones.
Lineup
Ralf Scheepers – vocals
Stefan Leibing – guitar
Henny Wolter – guitar
Mat Sinner – bass
Randy Black – drums
GUEST MUSICIANS:
Mats Ulmer – keyboards
Magnus Karlsson – guitar
Simone Simons – vocals (track no. 3)
Production
Mat Sinner
Track list
1. Sign Of Fear
2. Face The Emptiness
3. Everytime It Rains
4. New Religion
5. Fighting The Darkness/The Darkness/Reprise
6. Blood On Your Hands
7. Curse Of Sharon
8. Too Much Time
9. Psycho
10. World On Fire
11. Man (That I Don’t Know)
