Label: Nuclear Blast Records
Release date: July 24, 2020
Production: Mat Sinner
Album length: 57.03 min
Genre: Power Metal / Heavy Metal
Rating: 8.0/10
You can’t break a metal heart, can’t rip it out, let alone conquer it. No conditions. Here’s the new Primal Fear album. This is a band that will hit 25 years on the international scene in two years’ time. Led from day zero until today by the outstanding German metal vocalist Ralf Scheppers and veteran bassist and producer Mat Sinner, it has seen it all. Hell and heaven. The last album, “Apocalypse”, released in August 2018, was also the last one for the Italian label Frontiers Music Srl. That autumn the band did a serious European tour, which, alongside Riot V, also stopped at CUK Kino Šiška in Ljubljana. By then it had already signed a new deal with the German label Nuclear Blast Records. Or rather, it went back to them, having spent the golden era of its first decade right there. Last year the crew was joined by top-notch drummer Michael Ehre, who suddenly found himself without real work after the success of his Gamma Ray boss Kai Hansen, when Hansen teamed up with vocalist Michael Kiske to make Helloween Helloween again. Primal Fear couldn’t have landed a better solution for Francesco Jovino right now.
“Metal Commando”, which is also the name of the band’s German fan club, is a kind of dedication to all the band’s devoted fans. As the thirteenth album, its sermon sounds almost more stubborn and uncompromising than anything from the band’s early years, which more or less wrapped up with “Seven Seals” (2005). Primal Fear have been a sextet since 2008, with the superb multi-instrumentalist and composer Magnus Karlsson on board. Next to the all-German lineup he’s a kind of (Swedish) “black sheep” of the family, yet essential to its glue, as he’s regarded as someone with an exceptional feel for phrasing and composition. Even though Sinner has the final word on everything, the opinions and corrections of Karlsson, this peculiar figure working behind the scenes at Primal Fear, are surely vital in finalizing every single Primal Fear record.
“Metal Commando” doesn’t let up. It sums up the band’s recognizable recipe from past works. In fact, in its search for ideas Primal Fear dive dizzyingly down their own evolutionary tree, straight to the roots. So the new record, already the band’s thirteenth, no longer surprises. Anyone who’s only now getting to know the band through it will get “blown away”. If the feelings are positive, they’ll keep discovering the band from here on, because they’ll sense how tight and impenetrable Primal Fear are at forging their songs even after two good decades. Experience is priceless. Add boundless talent and the permanently sharp musical vision of this brotherhood. Nobody can take that away from them.
While the most hardened fans, who more or less stopped following the band after “Devil’s Ground” (2004), no longer matter much since they make up a minority of the following, the rest, who have been discovering the band more “seriously” over a longer time, will quickly figure out that the first half of the album is a bit more weighed down by the hunt for a link back to the band’s first era. That’s confirmed right away by the opening I Am Alive and especially Along Came the Devil (rhythmically it takes its cue from, say, the U.D.O. classic Holy, with Judas Priest and Accept as the common denominator), where Scheppers delivers his traditional trademark of nuclear destructiveness, and it becomes clear he’ll have no problem unleashing even Chainbreaker on the new tour. Halo is a typical German march, where the feel-good chorus melody owes a debt to the classic Helloween charge of the eighties. Like waking up in 1998. But updated for 2020. More interesting stuff follows with Hear Me Calling, which is finally a darkly theatrical, mid-tempo but predatory number, where the band strikes just the right balance between old and new, and the build-up of atmosphere takes over, delivering a triumphant crescendo in the chorus. In The Lost & The Forgotten, the decorative motif hovers above the lead motif, as if it had strayed into the song from some Axel Rudi Pell tune. My Name is Fear, judging by the title alone, is one of the most speed-crazed, devastating tracks on the album, and the power the sextet unleashes on it is unbelievable. The distribution of forces is outstanding, and in the end the jagged bristling hits its expressive peak!
The album stays compact and uncompromising. We’d all have survived without the “saccharine” I Will Be Gone, propped up by acoustic guitars. The twist with this album is that it gets more interesting in the second half. Especially after that aforementioned “teary slowie”, the last four tracks finally “take off” and rise to another artistic level. In Primal Fear there are no fewer than three guitarists trading off, complementing each other, linking up, you name it… Alex Beyrodt and Tom Naumann have known each other for ages, there are no games of hide-and-seek between them, and everyone who has ever seen them work together on stage knows it. And then there’s Karlsson too, with his contrasting “Scandi-Yngwie-like” playing style, which adds extra variety to the songs. How all three guitarists work together, and the chemistry of this guitar theater as the album develops it, is a constant charm of the release. The album hits its peak in this department right at the end, with its most ambitious piece. That’s the over-thirteen-minute-long “Infinity”, which simply thrills with its varied course of events, its string of mood swings, and its incredible, breathtaking guitar execution. For true fans of this band, this track will conjure up the definitive highlight of the album.
The power of “Metal Commando” is monstrous once again. Primal Fear have delivered a new album in their series of stainless-steel preaching, bending sharply under the weight of spewing fire and the neighing of guitar machine guns, the savage stampede of double bass drum pedals, the untamed, mocking, sinister, ultra-high vocal theater of Scheppers, and the piercing, glaring, bluntly chopped bass lines of Mat Sinner. Evolution stopped a long time ago, but the formula is one of a kind, and these seasoned old foxes know exactly how to crank out a fresh batch of true-metal marches that will keep power metal fans under the spell of that primal German recipe of white-hot ironworks clatter for a good while.
Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Tracklist:
01. I Am Alive
02. Along Came The Devil
03. Halo
04. Hear Me Calling
05. The Lost & The Forgotten
06. My Name Is Fear
07. I Will Be Gone
08. Raise Your Fists
09. Howl Of The Banshee
10. Afterlife
11. Infinity
Lineup:
Ralf Scheepers – vocals
Mat Sinner – bass guitar, backing vocals
Alex Beyrodt – guitar
Tom Naumann – guitar
Magnus Karlsson – guitar
Michael Ehré – drums
