Label: SPV/Steamhammer Records
Release date: 9/17/2021
Production: Rage
Album length: 50.02 min
Genre: Power Metal
Rating: 9.5/10
Resurrection day. The day we’ve been feverishly waiting for. The day when everything comes together and both sides of the equation balance out, but also the day that heralds a new beginning. And, last but not least, the day the legendary Hamburg power metallers Rage drop their new studio album with exactly that title. There’s a lot of symbolism packed into it. Just consider this: after all the rough and beautiful times he has lived through, survived and still breathes, the band’s founder and boss, lead composer, singer and bassist Peter ‘Peavy’ Wagner, who has kept the band going non-stop since 1984 and is a true legend of the German metal scene, still loves making music, still keeps the creative drive going and the band alive. “Resurrection Day” is, believe it or not, the band’s 25th studio album, and ‘Peavy’ has absolutely nothing left to prove. But clearly passion and a big heart keep pushing him onward. And that counts.
Rage are a band that has gone through plenty of ‘little deaths’ and reincarnations, or resurrections if you like. Even several eras with drastic stylistic shifts. Anyone who will never forget the era when Wagner worked with the Belarusian musical wizard Victor Smolski will get that last remark. But that story closed long ago, and after it the band entered a gradual transition in which it started flirting with its roots again, and in the extremely short span of the last four years it has stacked up no fewer than three new studio albums. The latest of them, “Wings Of Rage” (RockLine review), came out just last year.
Well, that was also the year the band got shaken up by yet another one of its endless lineup shuffles. Last summer, Peter ‘Peavy’ Wagner revealed that the band was once again operating as a quartet. He brought in two new guitarists. First came Stefan Weber (ex-Axxis), who replaced Marcos Rodriguez, followed a few weeks later by a second guitarist, Jean Bormann (Angel Inc, Rage & Ruins). The fourth member remains drummer Vassilios “Lucky” Maniatopoulos, who has been behind the kit for Rage since 2015.
That made the band three-quarters German again, and right after the (re)formation they recorded and released (back in mid-June last year) a new version of the “Black In Mind” classic The Price Of War, putting it out as The Price Of War 2.0. You’ll find it as a bonus track on the special (limited) edition of the new album.
Yes. This ties right back to that last paragraph. On the new album the band has combined a string of fresh musical ideas with the creative talents of both new members, because the working and creative chemistry of the new Rage is an absolutely new story. ‘Peavy’, the seasoned, cunning old-guard fox, has made the most of that. You can hear it all over the new album, which bursts at the seams with inspiration and a brilliant mix of mockery, bristling fury and flung-around anger, plus moments of the occult and doom, all blending beautifully with a highly musical catchiness that peaks in snappy, predatory chorus melodies. It’s something Peavy’ has always chased in the band’s elemental vocabulary. This time the new album embodies that recipe phenomenally. With “Resurrection Day”, Rage have thus closed out their road of transition toward the era when they worked as a quartet, which is the era of the classic Rage albums “Black In Mind” and “End Of All Days”. All while “Resurrection Day” is, as mentioned, a beast of a new age that brilliantly fuses the band’s old DNA with the current musical and creative genome of the newborn quartet. Apparently that 75% ‘Germanness’ of the new quartet lineup is key to the credibility that holds up against every comparison.
“Resurrection Day” kicks off brilliantly. A theatrical intro, followed by a barrage of ‘slaps in the face’ and ‘wrecking balls’ of the band’s blazing, venomously hissing power metal. At times they also eye up the gains of Teutonic thrash metal (Virginity, The Age Of Reason, Extinction Overkill), though that’s very well hidden behind the high musicality the new songs develop. It’s no news anymore that ‘Peavy’s’ voice has dropped drastically over the years, but in the lead melodies it’s once again harmonized excellently with choir-like vocal lines, which climb higher where needed relative to ‘Peavy’s’ current vocal range. The album, which charges over hill and dale, only slows down right before the end, with its one mildly calmer moment, Black Room, though it loses none of its theatrical bite, menace and gloom. The production is excellent again, alive, pecking and biting with incredible eruptiveness, and the band, in the guise of a newly ‘sharpened’ quartet, as is its tradition, doesn’t neglect the occasional dalliance with neo-classical figures, expressed through orchestral arrangements. The first such example is the intro, followed right after by the album’s title track. In this regard, Traveling Through Time also deserves a mention: it was inspired by the classical composition Schiarazula Marazula, created by the Italian Renaissance composer Giorgio Mainerio.
Yes. It reads like a fairytale, but this 25th album from this long-lived and, it seems, indestructible legendary German heavy metal outfit deserves praise all around. It’s an excellent, striking, thoroughly proper Rage album that, as I said, breathes in and takes a run-up on the wings of the newborn quartet’s chemistry, and flirts vividly, cunningly and effectively with the creative times of almost three decades ago. An album of old colliding with new, an album of the band’s new era, and last but not least an album that will definitely not leave fans of classic Rage in the lurch.
Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Tracklist:
1. Memento Vitae (Overture) (1:14)
2. Resurrection Day (4:18)
3. Virginity (3:41)
4. A New Land (3:49)
5. Arrogance And Ignorance (5:00)
6. Man In Chains (4:36)
7. The Age Of Reason (4:22)
8. Monetary Gods (3:54)
9. Mind Control (4:14)
10. Traveling Through Time (4:13)
11. Black Room (4:49)
12. Extinction Overkill (5:52)
Lineup:
Peter ‘Peavy’ Wagner – vocals, bass guitar
Stefan Weber – guitar
Jean Bormann – guitar
Vassilios “Lucky” Maniatopoulos – drums, backing vocals
