Label: ROAR! Rock Of Angels Records
Release date: August 26, 2022
Production: Chris Boltendahl & Axel “Ironfinger” Ritt
Album length: 49.43 min
Genre: Heavy Metal / Power Metal
Rating: 8.5/10
The comfort zone can be okay. Especially if you’ve found your own recognizable sound. And yet. If you swap out a key player but still want to hold on to your identity, the whole thing can turn into a proper nightmare when those two positions happen to be the vocalist or the guitarist. We’re talking metal here. Well, Grave Digger are something of a phenomenon in that respect. Even when they recycle themselves, they do it perfectly decently and credibly. The records do swing back and forth, in the sense that the recycling works out better one time and a bit less so the next. So a few years back we got the rather mediocre “Healed By Metal” (2017) and “The Living Dead” (2018, RockLine review), while “Fields Of Blood” (2020, RockLine review) partly fixed the bad taste.
The new album in this vein, “Symbol Of Eternity”, is the more successful of the records Grave Digger have put out with Axel Ritt in the lineup. Ritt is a perfectly decent, quality guitarist, the bad luck is just that before him Uwe Lulis (now with Accept) and Manni Schmidt played guitar in Grave Digger, and they showed the world every single guitar phrase the band owns. Going by the first sentence of this paragraph, you can already guess that the new album takes us back to the days of “Return of the Reaper” (2014), which is actually the first Grave Digger album comparable in quality to what Grave Digger put out before 2010. The kicker is that on the new album Grave Digger have gone back to symbolism and historical legends and tales of the Crusades, meaning the lyrics tie into the theme of “Knights Of The Cross” (1998). They did something similar on “Return Of The Reaper”, where they were sort of hunting for the levers of metallic jaggedness of the cult “The Reaper” (1993). If warming over themes about lionhearted Scottish clans didn’t work out too well for them, …
So, let’s quickly run through the material. Anyone who has never heard Grave Digger, or has no feel for the jumps between albums defined by the switches of the last three guitarists (let’s leave the eighties out of it), I can say straight up won’t go far wrong if they grab (without much thinking) the latest album “Symbol Of Eternity”. It’s got everything. Excellent production that’s bristling, full, voluminous, in a way ‘guitar-greasy and riff-pleasingly thick’, with a proper embrace of doomy theatrical drama, plus a touch of flirting with the occult. The songs are defined by piercing, spiky riffs that kick straight into your face, with Ritt keeping up a glaring bristle. With a single guitar, that is. As per Grave Digger tradition. They stepped away from it for a moment only with the album “The Ballads Of Hangman” (2009), but quickly dropped the idea of having more than one guitarist. Every track on the new album is thematically tied to the era of the Crusades, and Grave Digger also slip in a few semitone-sharpened tricks in the phrasing (the central Nights Of Jeruzalem – one of the most impressive compositions on the new album), which boosts the distinctly metallic bristle produced by the razor edge of the guitar phrasing. It’s worth adding that Chris Boltendahl’s vocal ‘croak’ remains one of a kind in the world of Teutonic metal, and beyond. On the new album it’s again excellently produced and shows not a speck of wear. That’s the studio, of course. But when you glance at the year the band was founded, all you can do is bow before Chris.
“Symbol of Eternity” is well stocked with slap-in-the-face, bristling heavy metal assaults (Hell Is My Purgatory, the opening Battle Cry, Holy Warfare,…), accompanied by dark pomp, with a subtly slipped-in seasoning of orchestration and keyboards pushed into a contrasting background (this works great, for instance, in the predatory Grace Of God, which in its arrangement borrows a pinch from the classic The Curse of Jacques). The band knows what it’s doing. Routine, experience. No slip-ups here. With the exception of the atmospheric lead track, i.e. the title track, and the aforementioned Grace Of God, “Symbol Of Eternity” gallops from song to song on the wings of high-octane burning and frying (of the poor ‘godless’) Saracens. Grave Digger have pulled off an excellent ‘recycling of themselves’ on the new album. That means the record as a whole is intensely gripping throughout and never lets up in the predatory phrasing and Boltendahl’s bellowing. Nicely ‘stretched’ to under 50 minutes of total running time. There are two preludes and eleven true-blue tracks on it. At last, a Grave Digger album that doesn’t get boring over its running time. You have to take the closing Hellas Hellas as part of the deal, which works like a bonus track, sung in Greek, though nothing in this write-up suggests there’s anything wrong with that move.
So “Symbol Of Eternity” is one of the Grave Digger albums released after 2010 that plays in the top quality league. Alongside “Return Of The Reaper” (2014), it’s the best achievement when you compare the albums with Axel Ritt in the guitarist’s seat. In that respect it stands quite confidently shoulder to shoulder even with the most prominent classics of this cult and long-lived outfit from Gladbeck, Germany, active since 1980. True-believer loyalty to a recipe that ignites has thus more than paid off for Grave Digger this time.
Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Tracklist:
1. The Siege Of Akkon
2. Battle Cry
3. Hell Is My Purgatory
4. King Of The Kings
5. Symbol Of Eternity
6. Saladin
7. Nights Of Jerusalem
8. Heart Of A Warrior
9. Grace Of God
10. Sky Of Swords
11. Holy Warfare
12. The Last Crusade
13. Hellas Hellas
Lineup:
Chris Boltendahl – vocals
Axel Ritt – guitar
Jens Becker – bass
Marcus Kniep – drums
