Label: SPV/Steamhammer
Release date: September 18, 2020
Production: Raven
Album length: 38.55 min
Genre: Heavy Metal
Rating: 8.5/10
For fans of the days when metal was the young, innocent child of the ever-harder rock of the seventies, those were unforgettable times of burning hearts and huge enthusiasm. A bubbling feeling that anything was possible and every dream could come true. A time brimming with raw creative energy that, among other things, drove the rapid development of this fascinating genre into many equally fascinating subgenre spheres. Raven are one of those bands that were in the right place at the right time. They were part of that eruption. Brothers Mark and John Gallagher founded the band way back in 1974! Raven jumped into the movement known as the N.W.O.B.H.M. And? They saw it all. Unlike many of their generational peers who came out of the N.W.O.B.H.M. days, Raven never officially broke up and/or reactivated later. Never. The only pause came when guitarist Mark Gallagher suffered a nasty accident in 2001, when a wall collapsed on him during a gig and injured both his legs, which forced the band into four years of enforced downtime. Raven’s eighties albums are classics. Especially the first two, »Wiped Out« (1982) and »Rock Until You Drop!« (1981), which radically shaped the sound of early Metallica, as well as Anthrax and a few others who soon after headed in the thrash metal direction.
In today’s Raven lineup, the unstoppable glow and blaze of the flaming torch of musical incarnation is kept alive by the uncorrupted metal hearts of both Gallagher brothers, and that’s enough. As far as maintaining all that credibility goes. In 2017 they were joined by new drummer Mike Heller. The band has been based in the US for quite some time, even though the Gallaghers are Brits from Newcastle, England (the album title »Metal City« refers precisely to Newcastle).
The new album follows in many ways in the footsteps of its predecessor »ExermiNation« (2015). It’s another catchy slab of metal, where the old school, the modern-day studio exploitation of everything technological progress has to offer, and the internalized drive to reach extremely aggressive destructiveness have found a fascinating common denominator in one big, reconciling dialogue.
That’s why »Metal City« is special in every way. Because it’s a pure-blooded Raven album, plain and simple. Heller is a technically superbly equipped and polished drummer and, compared to his predecessor Joe Hasselvander, definitely a modern-day addition to the band, which in turn has intensified and sharpened the contrast of its drama, its performance potency and the arrangements themselves. The drum fills buckle under sheer explosiveness, and Heller is especially omnipresent on the album in holding down the dazzling rhythmic culture and kinetics of the songs, all of which roll along on the ferociously torpedoing march of double bass drum pedals.
What Raven are doing in these new times is nothing other than a formula, optimized to the max and in every detail of maturity, that they served up at the start of their career and that stems from growing up on the racing, influential rock’n’roll of the seventies (on the album, Top of the Mountain comes closest to that). Only now it’s been stylistically updated and honed with age. For the new era, it’s more than convincingly crossed with an implant of aggression, woven into uncompromising phrasing and a rhythmic rush. And commanding it all is the excellent vocal of John Gallagher, who in his later years still conjures up a damn lot of power and hits even the highest vocal registers like it’s nothing, with undiminished strength and fierce intensity. Some of those screams are downright fascinating. How much studio “tinkering” went into it, we’ll never know, but if John Gallagher really does still pull off that kind of vocal on stage today, the man has a throat of tin with an indestructible steel circular saw lodged in it since the seventies.
The songs are mostly short ‘pulsers’ that don’t let the listener breathe for a second. They grab you right away. With high-octane voltage they snap your neck vertebrae and refuse to compromise by leaving any survivors in their wake in such a fury. That goes for the opener The Power, and especially for Human Race, Cybertron and Break, which hit with extreme, crushing force. Once again the band surprised us with more anthemic bombast in tracks like the album’s title track, Battlescarred, and the closing mini-suite, which clocks in at over six minutes, When Worlds Collide, where you could’ve guessed in advance that the reason is that it’s played at a slightly slower tempo. That means the album is hugely dynamic thanks to its varied, vivid ideas, even though it’s clear that the formula, or recipe, has been law for the band for years, and they diligently stick to its postulates. The new album’s edge over its predecessor »ExermiNation« is also that it’s less weighed down in the arrangements, that it has fewer songs, and that they’re decisively shorter. Because with Raven, the compositional axiom »less is more« always clicked. And they’ve made full-blooded sense of it again on »Metal City«, which by the standards of this long-lived and obviously indestructible band is more than an excellent achievement. It bursts with sincerity, while giving a confident sense of the exceptional maturity of the three players in the lineup.
And last but not least. The fun and lucid comic-book cover, in the spirit of »We’re all a bit off, but we long to be superheroes«, couldn’t fit the band’s new music any better.
Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Track list:
01. The Power (3:55)
02. Top of the Mountain (3:36)
03. Human Race (3:59)
04. Metal City (3:27)
05. Battlescarred (4:45)
06. Cybertron (3:24)
07. Motorheadin’ (2:42)
08. Not So Easy (3:09)
09. Break (3:39)
10. When Worlds Collide (6:15)
Lineup:
John Gallagher – vocals, bass
Mark Gallagher – guitar
Mike Heller – drums
