Primal Fear: Apocalypse

Label: Frontiers Music Srl.
Release date: August 10, 2018
Producer: Jakob Hansen & Mat Sinner
Album length: 50:11
Rating: 9 / 10

Primal Fear, the long-running German power metallers from Esslingen near Stuttgart, may well be in the best position right now that they’ve ever been in since they officially entered the music business. This year marks 20 years since the release of their cult self-titled debut, which at the end of the last millennium helped kick off a wave of revival for the melodic and classic side of metal, and that’s when we started lumping such new metal bands together under the “power metal” label.

Primal Fear have come a long way in twenty years. The lineup is full of seasoned music-business veterans and outstanding players who have tried their hands, and still do, in all sorts of other projects and bands. For a long time Primal Fear’s style was strictly and clearly mapped out, following its drawn-up musical geometry without compromise. Well, somewhere around “New Religion” (2007) they started reaching for other musical ingredients too, slowly, with more or less success, working them into their sharply staked-out power metal groove.

Never mind that these days everyone is “competing” over who’s the bigger badass when pulling on a shirt of the most extreme metal band in the world, because at the very same time “outdated” power metal is creeping back into the spotlight through new-generation acts like Sabaton, Powerwolf and Gloryhammer. And they pull it off with ease, despite being incredibly generic (offset by stage kitsch). That very fact is also a big help to bands with a much longer track record, far greater artistic profile and a more precisely defined sound and style, since a “freshly hooked” Euro power metal fan who discovers Sabaton will very quickly start discovering, among others, Primal Fear, HammerFall and/or Blind Guardian. “Apocalypse” is far from leaning on the tricks of the newcomers and much younger bands, but among the Primal Fear albums released, measured from “New Religon” onward, it’s honestly the most polished and mature Primal Fear record, hands down. If its predecessor “Rulebreaker” stumbled a bit from mild creative fatigue and a lack of freshness, “Apocalypse” is its opposite. It delivers an extremely successful, convincing blend, superbly spread and balanced across the whole album, of orchestral elements with the classic Primal Fear groove. For instance, if anyone remembers the Sinner album “Nature of Evil”, let me hint that the instrumental passage leading into the acoustic transition in Eye of the Storm is compositionally tied to the title track of that cult Sinner album, which might be a parallel that can convince you right now that “Apocalypse” really is one of the best albums of Primal Fear’s career released to date.

Production-wise, too, “Apocalypse” is a superb achievement. The delicacy of the extra layered lines from the “siren-like” Scheppers, who “dress up” his lead vocal lines with harmonies, absolutely shines. Once again there’s the stunning solo sharpness of three outstanding soloists and the tight, locked-in drum rolls in the transitions, which boost the flow of the songs and which, almost proverbially, we always enjoy on Primal Fear albums. The mood swings are outstanding too. For all its theatrical, epic musicality, the album is dark and black enough, and it bites with relentless apocalyptic force, fitting its meaningful title. The intro and the first two bashers don’t yet hint at the great artistic maturity the album delivers further on, when, through the outstanding Blood, Sweat & Fear, Supernova, Hail to the Fear, The Beast and especially the album’s central piece, the superb mini epic suite Eye of the Evil , in terms of variety, polished compositional structures and shifts in atmosphere, it swings up into a top-notch finale with the anthemic march Cannonball, which finally “washes” the virus called humanity off the face of planet Earth.

It shouldn’t be overlooked that Primal Fear, whom we most often see on stage as a quintet, are actually a sextet. For more than ten years now they’ve had the help of the exceptional, hyperactive Swedish genius Magnus Karlsson, who reads the wishes of bosses Mat Sinner and Ralf Scheppers brilliantly and, when it comes to the pleasing and successful integration of orchestrations, acoustic passages and novelties, artfully pours them into the band’s classic framework of charging riffs. Primal Fear have never nailed the right balance of power metal riff punch, epic scale, bombast, musical openness and compositional ingenuity as consistently as they do on “Apocalypse”.

by: Aleš Podbrežnik