Label: RPM-ROAR
Release date: January 17, 2025
Production: Chris Boltendahl
Album length: 46.47 min
Genre: Heavy Metal
Rating: 9.0/10
Grave Digger are legends of German heavy metal. Over a long career, the band has seen and been through pretty much everything. Thanks to the stubborn, uncompromising persistence of their indestructible leader, visionary and vocalist Chris Boltendahl, Grave Digger are still kicking at full steam today. Over all these years, the band has had its ups and downs and gone through plenty of lineup changes. It was even ‘beheaded’ once, only to be born again. The energy vibe of their albums has shifted along the way, too, and they’ve been rolling off the line like a conveyor belt, especially in the new-millennium era!
The style hasn’t changed much. The real turning points in the band’s career have been the guitarist swaps. On the new album, yet another new guitarist has joined Grave Digger: Tobias ‘Tobi’ Kersting, whom Boltendahl lured over from the camp of fellow German power metallers Orden Ogan. Kersting helped Boltendahl out on his solo project Chris Boltendahl’s Steelhammer, with the album “Reborn In Flames” (2023), and by the looks of it, Boltendahl was more than a little impressed with him.
The contradictory thing here is that Orden Ogan’s name has grown quite a lot lately and is still growing in popularity. Grave Digger, meanwhile, remain right where they’ve always been. Since forever. Behind the bars of club venues. And Kersting, to whom we wish nothing but the best, and who clearly wouldn’t have joined Grave Digger if he weren’t a fan of the band himself, might one day even regret the decision to join them. Orden Ogan are on the rise, however you look at it. But that’s not even the topic of the latest studio album Grave Digger have released with Kersting in the lineup.
A hallmark of the era of working with Axel Ritt was that the albums alternated in quality. They were either very well repackaged when it came to placing all the band’s essential, recognizable trademarks, or less inspired and therefore quickly forgotten. The last one with Ritt, though, was another very strong effort (“Symbol Of Eternity”, 2022, RocLine review).
“Bone Collector” is a very raw and incredibly direct successor. It’s driven by an exceptional burst of speed that flattens everything in its path. It’s packed with jagged, bristling phrases and cannon-fire barrages, or more precisely, merciless pounding on the double bass drum pedals. Right at the center of it all is the inexhaustible, instantly recognizable growl of good old ‘Reaper’, who simply has to be part of the story. All these essential elements of the classic Grave Digger stance are intensified more than ever this time. And that’s kind of surprising. The fact that the band can still squeeze out so much rage, fury and aggression even after years of maturity gives the album, as a whole, the feeling that the group has found a new drive, new wind in its sails! The album sounds fresh. We can talk about inspiration only to the extent needed for Grave Digger to once again very effectively repackage their musical recipe, which is of course unmistakably theirs, and serve it up to the audience yet again. And in that, Bone Collector is a thoroughly successful album.
Grave Digger don’t surprise with anything here, but they shake the listener with riffing and a deadly attitude that grabs hold with extraordinary vehemence. What’s actually surprising is that after all these years Boltendahl doesn’t run dry. Quite the opposite. He wants to prove that, with age, the band’s music can get even more jagged, sharpened and furious. Beyond all the known Grave Digger limits. The devastatingly doomy intro with the title track is already a surprise, but then Grave Digger hit the gas even harder in the very next track, The Rich The Poor The Dying, and squeeze out even more destruction. Kersting is phenomenal in his role. He justifies his place as the new Grave Digger guitarist in every way, just like Uwe Lulis, with whom Grave Digger recorded their greatest classics, and his successor Manni Schmidt before him. Kersting quickly internalized the essence of the classic Grave Digger riff, which means he settled into the band’s very suspension and workings perfectly cast. Like a key in a lock. The rest is nuance. It’s in the guitar solos, where he shows off his talent and creative brilliance and puts his own, personal dot on the ‘i’ of the band’s new-era album.
Kersting’s arrival in Grave Digger somewhat recalls the period when Manni Schmidt joined the crew. In 1999 they released the excellent “Excalibur” and nobody was thinking a change of guitarist was coming. Yet Schmidt jumped in. The first album with him followed, “Grave Digger” (2001). That very album was a first-rate showcase of the greatest inspiration in Schmidt’s guitar talent, which carried Grave Digger’s career triumphantly onward. Something similar has happened now. “Symbol of Eternity” is considered an excellent album, but its successor is not just excellent. It comes with an even bigger dose of inspiration, along with a minimal difference, because a new guitarist plays on it. A series of venomously incinerating guitar phrases that slap the listener across the album’s running time, plus a pronounced darkness that gains even more destructive reach on top of all the devastation, recalls the energy of the first Grave Digger album with Manni Schmidt. Though “Bone Collector” doesn’t contain a single ballad. It bites and attacks with extraordinary vehemence, without compassion, leaving no survivors behind. It’s relentlessly penetrating.
And the closing thought? The new Grave Digger album is an absolute must for every Grave Digger fan and anyone who enjoys the bluntly cranked-up Teutonic nature of guitar phrasing, with ‘no frills and no kitsch’. With “Bone Collector”, Grave Digger have reached into the upper tier of their albums in terms of quality. It can’t surpass the classic of the nineties, but it easily challenges all the other top-ranked Grave Digger albums, especially those released after 2000. So Boltendahl has survived and endured once again, and with Kersting and the new album, Grave Digger have come out of the tornado even stronger.
Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Track list:
1. Bone Collector
2. The Rich The Poor The Dying
3. Kingdom Of Skulls
4. The Devil’s Serenade
5. Killing Is My Pleasure
6. Mirror Of Hate
7. Riders Of Doom
8. Made Of Madness
9. Graveyard Kings
10. Forever Evil & Buried Alive
11. Whispers Of The Damned
Lineup:
Chris Boltendahl – vocals
Jens Becker – bass
Tobias Kersting – guitar
Marcus Kniep – drums
