Label: AFM Records
Release date: 26.04.2015
Album length: 54.01 min
Production: Piet Sielck
Genre: Heavy Metal / Power Metal
The Lord works in mysterious ways, doesn’t he? You produce your own studio album, and a few years later you realize you can never be happy with how it sounds. In 2007, Hamburg power metallers Iron Savior recorded and released their sixth studio album, “Megatropolis”. Plenty of people had predicted a quick decline for the band in 2001, after Kai Hansen (Gamma Ray, ex-Helloween) left following “Dark Assault”, but the very next year they shut up all the doubting Thomases with the excellent Condition Red, and two years later they topped even that with “Battering Ram” (2004). Both albums confirmed that founder Piet Sielck is really the band’s main engine and creative driving force. A creator of outstanding guitar phrases and a man with a remarkable knack for fusing metal aggression, darkness and serious musicality into one fascinating whole!
It was getting clear that the band was on an artistic upswing and that Sielck was getting along just fine on his own, without Hansen. In 2007, Iron Savior handed us an album that could have gone down as their creative peak, if only its production hadn’t limped a little and if… Sielck hadn’t “fixed” it this year. “Megatropolis”, that is. When the album came out, nobody among the general public, music critics included, paid that much attention to the production itself. Over the years, though, its creator Piet Sielck became very sensitive about how the album sounds. Personally.
And fair enough. Listen to the original version of “Megatropolis” and you quickly notice that the bass lines are basically nowhere to be heard, while the drums sound like someone drumming their fingernails on an empty matchbox. That’s a glaring flaw that even a “deaf-mute” listener could pick up with a little effort. But Sielck is a perfectionist, so he set about “polishing” the new version of the album from several angles. The band, in its current lineup, re-recorded the entire album. From head to toe. Vocals, backing vocals, guitars, bass, drums. Everything. The sound is now brought within a hair’s breadth of the band’s two most recent studio albums, “The Landing” (2011) and especially “The Rise of the Hero” (2014). “Megatropolis 2.0” sounds beefed up and possessed, fully alive. Maximum contrast. On one side you get a razor-sharp, lively wall of riffing guitars, and on the other (finally) a superb backdrop of high-octane dialogue between a stampeding herd of double bass drum pedals and the bass guitar lines. Wrapped around all of it is Piet Sielck’s voice, which compared to the original sounds even more decisive, confident, deeply felt, passionate and focused. In short, matured and upgraded. Over the years Sielck has grown into an outstanding metal singer. He has serious punch, and his voice can paint the songs dark, too. He’s the ideal singer for the genre Iron Savior belong to. On top of that, he has enriched the new version with freshly recorded vocal harmonies that feel considerably more dynamic and better fitted into the arrangements than on the original. There’s more. Sielck went through the original once more, very carefully, when it came to the track order. Simple: he wanted the album to finally develop its optimal effect on the listener. So he shook up the running order compared to the original and deliberately shuffled it. The album now opens with the snarling, spiked The Omega Man, while Running Riot, which opens the original, is only fifth on the list. The title track, for instance, is now second, while on the original it was fourth, and so on…
Iron Savior are a band people like to compare to Gamma Ray, which is totally fair. Still, Gammar Ray have kept a note of lucidity in their sound, which Hansen carried over to Gamma Ray from his days with Helloween. Iron Savior don’t have that note. Generally speaking, their songs are soaked in drama, even a sense of doom and blackness. They’d rather build them from minor than from major. The songs are also, by and large, very fast. Iron Savior barely know what a ballad is. “Megatropolis” is an album with three songs that run in what you might call “fourth gear” (if we’re going for the caricature, the top gear, that is, fifth). Those three are Cybernetic Queen, Still I Believe and A Tale From Down Below. “Megatropolis” is the point in Iron Savior’s career where Sielck managed to line up a series of verse-chorus combos with a seriously powerful payoff. With superb build-ups of atmosphere that peak in the chorus melodies and deliver an incredible culmination of metal punch and ultra-catchy musicality. It’s precisely on those three “slower” songs that this musical side is all the more intense.
It’s hard to pick favorites, because the songs all stand shoulder to shoulder in terms of quality. The album knows no arrangement or songwriting stumbles, and Sielck pulled off exactly what he set out to do. By reshuffling the track order compared to the 2007 original, he achieved a much stronger atmospheric impact and, by intensifying the dynamic flow of events, boosted the album’s mood-grabbing power in turn. Both musically and in its metal wrecking-ball punch, which is outstanding on the revamped version!
If “Megatropolis” as Iron Savior re-recorded it in 2015 had been made back in 2007, it would have gotten a spotless five stars out of five back then. Well, we can give them to it now, because it truly deserves them. This is an album without a single bad moment, grabbing the band’s musical record on a superbly captivating level of grand power metal fervor, carried by the creative vision of Piet Sielck.
Let’s hope the band finds enough financial backing to head out on at least a short tour of Europe, playing the “refreshed” and “rejuvenated” album “Megatropolis” in its entirety. From head to toe. With both bonus tracks, which in 2007 came out only on the Japanese version and are now woven into the album’s new shape in such a way that Hammerdown can be taken as a real part of “Megatropolis 2.0”. In short, “Megatropolis 2.0” is one of the artistically and expressively strongest moments in the band’s career. It will probably stay that way, just as Iron Savior will probably remain an unfairly overlooked and underrated band.
author: Aleš Podbrežnik
rating: 10 / 10
Tracklist:
1. The Omega Man 2.0
2. Megatropolis 2.0
3. Flesh 2.0
4. Cybernatic Queen 2.0
5. Running Riot 2.0
6. A Tale From Down Below 2.0
7. Cyber Hero 2.0
8. Still I Believe 2.0
9. Hammerdown 2.0
10. Farewell And Goodbye 2.0
11. Iron Watcher 2.0
Lineup:
Piet Sielck – vocals, guitar
Joachim “Piesel” Küstner – guitar, backing vocals
Jan-Sören Eckert – bass, backing vocals
Thomas Nack – drums
