Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Artist: Gamma Ray
Label: Metal-Is Records
Release: 2001
Rating: 4/5
“No World Order!” is the album by German power metal outfit Gamma Ray that followed “Powerplant” (1999). Considering the two-year gap between releases, the two records are pretty different. To pull that off, Gamma Ray ditched some of the more demanding arrangements that “Powerplant”, the likely creative peak of the band’s career, is stuffed with, especially in the intros, outros and middle instrumental sections of the songs.
This time Gamma Ray decided to strip down their sound a bit and keep things simple, gaining directness and bite in their “next to Helloween” brand of “power metal”. “No World Order!” keeps the core traits of Gamma Ray’s music fully intact. That means an avalanche of riff mastery over drum rolling pushed to speed extremes, with the double bass pedal wound up to the max. Then there’s the unique, instantly recognizable icy screech of Hansen’s obscure vocals, softened in classic Gamma Ray fashion by choir-style vocal arrangements in the choruses, the typical solo madness of the Hansen/Richter duo, and of course those guitar embellishments of three-part harmonies, often cut off sharply across the riffs.
Thanks to the simpler arrangements, “No World Order!” often sounds like a hypothetical offshoot of a late-eighties Judas Priest album (“Ram It Down”, “Painkiller”) or Primal Fear’s self-titled 1998 debut (check out the crushing Eagles, for example), but with that unmistakable Gamma Ray essence and smell. Because of this simplification, the rage spewed out by Hansen’s icy vocals comes through even more successfully, and together with the directness comes plenty of aggression too, so overall you get a much louder album than “Powerplant”. Whether it’s Dethrone Tyranny, the deadly The Heart Of The Unicorn with its extremely catchy chorus, or Heaven Or Hell and No World Order,…. From song to song things move at breakneck speed, with Gamma Ray metal-ruffled this time around. Only the closing track Lake Of Tears calms things down, bringing us back in gentler breezes to the vibe of its predecessor “Powerplant” (1999).
I have to point out the back cover art on this one. Flip the CD case over and you’re greeted by a motif of two spaceships in the upper left part of the drawing, with chaos and agony unfolding beneath them. If you look closely at the two vessels, you’ll notice they’re designed as a 3D enlargement of the American dollar sign. If you know the sign for the US dollar ($), it’s split lengthwise by one or two vertical lines. In the case of the spaceships on the back cover, the tips of both lines jutting above the S are “sharpened” into towers with antennas, and they easily call to mind the WTC twins, two gigantic office buildings in New York that were the subject of a horrifying tragedy in September 2001, whose direction and script will probably stir up tempers until the end of humankind. And if I hint that “No World Order!” came out exactly a month after both of those buildings collapsed into dust in the middle of New York (the album’s release date was 09.10.2001), the whole thing gets even more mysterious, and the album gains extra value because of it.
It’s funny that such a juicy detail went unnoticed by all the “American heroes”, “saviors of the world” and “exorcists of the cloud of evil” that had settled over the USA at the time. Dream Theater, for example, had just put out a triple live CD with a burning New York on the cover, and were forced to pull it from sale right away and change the artwork.
“No World Order!” is the last interesting Gamma Ray album. In terms of development, that is. The guys pulled off that interesting turn with a very simple trick: simplifying the more demanding “Powerplant” arrangements. The later albums “Majestic” and “Land Of The Free pt. 2” no longer offered any further creative growth for the band, and with them Gamma Ray became prisoners of replicating their own mold, so their releases ended up limited to feeding their loyal fan base.
Lineup
Kai Hansen – vocals, guitar
Henjo Richter – guitar, keyboards
Dirk Schlächter – bass guitar
Dan Zimmermann – drums
Production
Kai Hansen & Dirk Schlächter
Tracklist
1. Induction
2. Dethrone Tyranny
3. Heart Of The Unicorn
4. Heaven Or Hell
5. No World Order
6. Damn The Machine
7. Solid
8. Fire Below
9. Follow Me
10. Eagle
11. Lake Of Tears
Album length: 51:51
