Label: AFM Records
Reissue date: 19. 11. 2021
Production: Piet Sielck
Album length: 63.37 min
Genre: Power Metal
Rating: 9.0/10
Iron Savior, the Hamburg veterans of heavy metal and power metal, put out a reissue of their album »The Landing« in the middle of last November. It’s regarded as one of the biggest successes in the long career of this cult heavy metal outfit, a band that, let’s face it, has often been unfairly overlooked. The well-established German label AFM Records stepped in too, especially because fans have made »The Landing« one of the most beloved albums in the history of this power metal institution, and its success gave the band a real boost of new life. The album holds a few classics, like Starlight, Hall of the Heroes and, of course, a metal anthem with no equal – Heavy Metal Never Dies. A track that has racked up over 10,000,000 plays for the band to date. The reissue also lines up with the 10th anniversary of the original release. Mind you, it isn’t so much about a sonic facelift as about the fact that the album had been impossible to buy for quite a while. Now it’s back again. On CD and vinyl.
The reissue is titled “The Landing (10th Anniversary Edition)“, and for the occasion the album got a remix and a remaster, handled by the band’s chief, vocalist, guitarist and main songwriter Piet Sielck. Three previously unreleased tracks have also been added, and the cover art is slightly tweaked compared to the original.
RockLine put the album under the reviewer’s microscope ten years ago, when it first came out, so you can read the extensive essay HERE. So in what follows, let’s just highlight a few basic facts about its musical substance.
In 2007, Iron Savior released a wonderfully beautiful and emotionally powerful album called »Megatropolis«. Four years passed before »The Landing« arrived, and in that time the band forged another fine bag of top-quality musical ideas, or rather instantly gripping phrases, dictated by the band’s otherwise rich heavy-as-iron catalog of true-blue power metal marches. The album keeps up its compositional integrity and quality from head to toe, on the level of its predecessor, which means »The Landing« is really one of the band’s most notable and most accomplished studio efforts. With the then-new albums from fellow Germans Helloween and Grave Digger flopping artistically, and HammerFall’s experimental ceremony »Infected«, »The Landing« saved the genre’s honor in 2011, alongside the then-new Brainstorm record »On the Spur Of the Moment«.
Still, not everything went to plan for Sielck and company in those four years leading up to »The Landing«. Sielck poured a lot of energy into his band at the time, Savage Circus, which indirectly pushed back the release of »The Landing«. On top of that, his label Dockyard Records ‘collapsed’ during this period, going bankrupt in 2009. So the man had to deal with putting out the fire started by the foolish business moves of his colleagues at the label. He managed to sell off what was left of the label and somehow pay back the debts. He only started writing »The Landing« at the end of 2010, but it seems these events, the hell he had to go through, had more than a constructive effect on the shape of a truly excellent record.
»The Landing«, which is in a way important for the band also because Sielck and his crew ‘survived’, stays true to the band’s core musical vocabulary, while at the same time the band sounds fresh, inspired, bristling and destructive on it. In top form. The album keeps an ideal balance between the epic bombast of ravenous melodic hooks and ultra-high-voltage metal punch. Not even the really successful ballad Before The Pain spoils that. Bassist Jan-Sören Eckert also returned to Iron Savior on »The Landing«, having played with the band on »Unification« (1999), »Dark Assault« (2001) and »Condition Red« (2002). The reissue also includes two newly recorded Iron Savior classics, Atlantis Falling and Coming Home, plus a fun cover of the Underworld original Underneath the Radar, which was made during the album’s recording sessions.
Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Tracklist:
01. Descending (Intro)
02. The Savior
03. Starlight
04. March Of Doom
05. Heavy Metal Never Dies
06. Moment In Time
07. Hall Of The Heroes
08. R. U. Ready
09. Faster Than All
10. Before The Pain
11. No Guts No Glory
12. Coming Home (bonus, track, re-recorded)
13. Atlantis Falling (bonus track, re-recorded)
14. Underneath The Radar (bonus track)
Line-up:
Piet Sielck – vocals, guitar
Joachim “Piesel” Küstner – guitar, backing vocals
Jan-Sören Eckert – bass guitar, backing vocals
Thomas Nack – drums, backing vocals
