Even as we grow richer inside over the years, slowly discovering and exploring all sorts of genre spheres of music (where all that matters is whether the music is good or not), something remains undeniable. Emotions, passions that breed belonging and, I dare say, loyalty. To the grave. Even though I left behind the years when I’d get the shakes every time Primal Fear went out on tour, I’m still somehow committed to them and follow them regularly. And when they also deliver an excellent new studio release, like the new album “Apocalypse”, the bond with the band only gets more intense.
And when Riot V join them on tour, the legitimate successors of the legendary New York band that always stood for top-notch old-school heavy metal craftsmanship, and who also bring back memories of the days when the lineup, under the classic name Riot and led by the late guitarist Mark Reale, stopped at the end of January 2000 in Ljubljana’s K 4, the nostalgia hits even harder and calls you irresistibly to another gig get-together.
No, we couldn’t wait for Primal Fear and Riot V to hit Ljubljana’s CUK Kino Šiška, where both bands play on Sunday, 21.10.2018. Since the Salzburg show was part of the tour schedule almost three weeks earlier, Salzburg is still close to Ljubljana, and the local Rockhouse has always been a hugely warm, homey club for us, we promptly set off for Salzburg. And? We had a blast. No Stiegl in hand, but the equally wheaty Weihenstephanner stepped in worthily.
Shortly before 8:30 PM, French heavy metal revivalists Existance were already tearing up the stage, with a solid, clearly audible pillar of inspiration in the NWOBHM legacy. The band isn’t exactly green. They’ve been around since 2008, with two studio albums in their pocket: “Steel Alive” (2014) and the current “Breaking the Rock” (2016). It didn’t take long for proof that the quartet slings rocks with confidence. The band’s main engine, guitarist and vocalist Julien Izard, knows how to leave a strong impression. He has a pleasant, fitting voice to go with the fast, razor-sharp riff rattling. Despite Julien being glued to the mic, the band is still agile on stage, and they made smart use of the small stage, borrowing some theatrical vocabulary from eighties bands (Iron Maiden). Julien gets backup from second guitarist Antoine Poiret, with whom he shares the solos. The riffs are often decorated with harmonies in thirds, which is no revolution. So. Existance really aren’t a musical revolution, and they aren’t as ungodly wild as, say, Belgium’s Evil Invaders. Far from giving the impression of bad boys. A solid opening half hour of pleasant company with a confident, bristling band that approaches everything with commitment and is therefore very convincing.
There were quite a few fervent Riot fans at the venue tonight. Today the legacy of this legendary, cult American band lives on, successfully, under the name Riot V. The lineup features two contemporaries of Mark Reale, the outstanding guitarist Mike Flyntz and rock-solid bassist Don Van Stavern, rounded out by the young and talented Nick Lee on guitar, who is Flyntz’s student, the hugely experienced master of the double bass drum pedals Frank Gilchriest (ex-Virgin Steele), and the incredible screamer Todd Michael Hall. Just like on our two encounters with the band years ago at the Metaldays and Bang Your Head!!! festivals, Riot V enchanted the crowd with outstanding tightness, relentless stage ferocity and all the octane voltage with which they shook Rockhouse tonight. Watch Flyntz and you know this is a man who, when it comes to the manual skills of guitar playing, is a shaman of his trade. Only once did he slip up, when he stepped behind the stand of Hall’s microphone to announce a song and was late getting back to his footswitcher, which resulted in him “sleeping through” the opening riff. Otherwise, his performance remains a veritable fairy tale of approaching the classic school of heavy metal. The band naturally presented the new studio album “Armor of Light”, which, like its predecessor “Unleash the Fire (2014)”, is an excellent achievement, but we were all waiting especially for the band’s unforgettable sweet treats made in the eighties, seventies, and even the nineties. With the obligatory Bloodstreets, one of the finest compositions in the band’s iron repertoire, backed by the expected standard Johnny’s Back, the close of the one-hour storm fell to the “holy trinity” of Warrior, Swords & Tequilla, and of course the more-than-mandatory Thundersteel. Right at the start came a very pleasant surprise in the “Narita” (1979) classic Road Racin’, a bit later they played the fourth Thundersteel classic, Flight of the Warrior, and completely caught us off guard by working in the fantastic Angel Eyes from the excellent but mildly overlooked “Inishmore” (1998).. Take Me Back, a song kept over from the predecessor “Unleash the Fire”, rides superbly along the legacy of the classics and sounds like a track written in the first half of the eighties, while the band’s sturdy position on the metal map was cemented, of course, by the new songs, led by the opening Victory, then Angel’s Thunder Devil’s Reign and Caught In A Witche’s Eye. The band constantly changes up its set. At every show they swap out up to five numbers, while of course keeping the classics of the iron repertoire in.
Riot V are an outstanding band. The new live experience with them confirmed it. They had barely arrived straight from a tour of Japan to join the new European run with Primal Fear. They could have played two and a half hours, that’s how much rehearsed repertoire they have, and still. To get in front of at least a halfway decent number of people at European venues, they have to “hitch” themselves to a bigger name on the metal map. That’s just how it goes. But this is a band that should be headlining its own tours in Europe.
Primal Fear are a crew of incredibly experienced and polished musicians. The band was founded in 1996 by two iconic figures of German metal, Mat Sinner and Ralf Scheepers, who still share all the boss duties in the band in the new era. At the time the band formed, power metal was on the rise. Scheepers, who suddenly found himself out of a job after three albums with Gamma Ray, first auditioned for the new singer of Judas Priest, and when he didn’t get the gig there, he and Sinner launched Primal Fear. The band’s self-titled debut, released in 1998, is considered one of the integral albums that, alongside HammerFall’s debut, helped drive the unexpected rise of power metal, or its popularization, at the time. The cemented musical recipe started picking up new qualities in 2007 with “New Religion”. Primal Fear became open to orchestral arrangements, the keyboard arrangements intensified too, and the compositions grew more and more varied. Cranked-up power metal, which of course draws from the Judas Priest treasury, was thus freshened up, and by 2018 the band had lined up a series of quality albums, with the latest of them, the recently released “Apocalypse”, considered one of the best Primal Fear albums since “Seven Seals”.
The band, which is officially a sextet, works as a quintet at live shows. The sixth member, Swede Magnus Karlsson, who stays home because of a glut of work, is an integral part of arranging and composing all the new Primal Fear music. They’ve been using pre-recorded backing tracks for years, since the days of simpler arranging, when the band could reconstruct the studio version of a song on stage with some auxiliary keyboards, are long gone.
What was hugely encouraging tonight was that Rockhouse was full. No, they weren’t Saxon. With them the club usually bursts at the seams. The organizer was even afraid at first that the show would have to be held in the bar, like when Rage and Ozzy’s famous guitarist Gus G, with his Firewind, had to play there this past January. But Primal Fear drew close to 500 people, which is highly commendable for the spoiled Austrian concert crowd that has had its fill of everything good. The always somewhat reserved Austrian audience took real part in the show with the band. Ralf had to keep stoking them up a bit the whole way through, but that always woke the good-natured congregation right up. Scheepers remains outstanding, and so still one of the greatest vocal talents of the entire German power metal era. A “thickened echo effect” from the mixing desk helps him out there, and Ralf is no spring chicken anymore. But compared with the less confident show two years ago in Vienna, he sang at a really high level. The rest of the crew is no less seasoned. Given the somewhat smaller stage, the guitar duo got into fewer shoulder-to-shoulder duels, but Beyrodt and Naumann once again justified all their soloing brilliance while also stunning with incredible tightness. Especially when it came to shared solos in mid eight passages, or simply harmonizing riffs in thirds. Bassist Mat Sinner has put on a few more kilos again, and he remains, of course, a stately vocal support for Ralf, and their diametrically opposed voices still sound incredible together in harmonies. None of this would be possible without Francesco Jovino on drums, who is finally a drummer who has “stuck” in the lineup and so filled the gap left behind by Randy Black.
Primal Fear served up a very well-balanced setlist. As expected, the new songs led the way, with the superb Eye of the Storm standing out in particular, but they also surprised quite a bit by working in some mildly forgotten points of their career, like the “Jaws Of Death” classic Under Your Spell. Moments from the album “New Religion” are always warmly welcomed. Alongside the excellent Facing the Truth, Primal Fear pulled off a big surprise in the encore, tackling one of the most ambitious compositions of their career, the outstanding mini-suite Fighting the Darkness. It was played in full! The band got the crowd up right from the start with two absolute evergreens, Final Embrace and Chainbreaker. Then came songs from the iron repertoire, Nuclear Fire and the closing Metal Is Forever. Primal Fear delivered the peak right at the end. With the excellent Running in the Dust, they went back to the debut “Primal Fear” (1998). As for the cheekiness and cheer at Primal Fear shows, that’s always down to the mischievous Tom Naumann, a man without whom Primal Fear simply wouldn’t be the real Primal Fear.
Excellent in every respect. If any of you have read all this, I sincerely hope these lines, as lovers of heavy sounds kicked out along the classic heavy metal track, bring you in the biggest possible numbers to the Ljubljana show of Primal Fear and Riot V, which is announced for Sunday, 21.10.2018. It’s the mandatory metal communion of this fall in Slovenia.
author: Aleš Podbrežnik
photos: Aleš Podbrežnik
setlist:
RIOT V:
1. Victory
2. Flight Of The Warrior
3. Road Racin’
4. Johnny’s Back
5. Caught In A Witche’s Eye
6. Angel Eyes
7. Bloodstreets
8. Take Me Back
9. Angels Thunder, Devil’s Reign
10. Swords & Tequilla
11. Warrior
12. Thundersteel
PRIMAL FEAR:
1. Apocalypse (taped intro)
2. Final Embrace
3. Chainbreaker
4. Blood, Sweat & Fear
5. Face the Emptiness
6. Hounds of Justice
7. The Ritual
8. Under Your Spell
9. Nuclear Fire
10. Eye of the Storm
11. King of Madness
12. The End Is Near
13. When Death Comes Knocking
14. Metal Is Forever
—encore—
15. Fighting the Darkness
16. Running in the Dust
17. Born Again (taped outro)
