Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Artist: Iron Savior
Label: AFM Records
Release: 2011
Length: 49:20
Rating: 4/5
The new album from German power metallers Iron Savior arrives like it was made to order, fixing the bad taste Helloween and Grave Digger have recently left with their latest studio efforts. Shortly before the new Iron Savior record, Brainstorm already sweetened that bitter aftertaste with an excellent new album of their own, and “The Landing” is yet another record that’s built exactly the way it should be when we’re talking Iron Savior.
Iron Savior are a lesser-known name on the power metal scene, and they’ve been around since way back in 1997, when Piet Sielck got things going together with his buddies Kai Hansen (Gammar Ray, ex-Helloween) and Tomen Stauch (ex-Blind Guardian). Through both his persona and his work, Piet Sielck is thoroughly woven into the careers of Helloween, Gamma Ray and Blind Guardian, and he played an important part in the early steps of all those bands, with ideas, as a producer and as a co-arranger. So he’s a man who today belongs to the league of “metal sages” and sort of gurus of German power metal.
All of this shows on the new Iron Savior album, the first in four years since “Megatropolis” (2007). In the riffs and the way the songs are put together, you can’t miss a similar musical mindset to Gamma Ray’s, and now and then to Blind Guardian’s too. The riffing itself recalls Gamma Ray, with that signature harmonic picking over the riffs, while Sielck’s vocals remind you most of Blind Guardian (even more so when backed by vocal harmonies). He doesn’t have the flexibility of range or the tonal color of Hansi Kuersch (Blind Guardian), but he keeps up a tremendous power, just as the unstoppable riff usurpation resting on those vampirically rolling double bass drum pedals demands.
After a four-year break, Sielck has served up an album of perfectly dressed power metal marches that you really can’t take anything away from or add anything to. Anthemic, epic bombast, atmospheric peaks in the chorus melodies, wonderfully venomous, jagged primordial riffing that comes straight out of the real old Teutonic school of metal, the kind they’ve always brewed in Hamburg and around it. You just can’t find more steely, classic-sounding power metal of strict German blueprint anymore.
Even though the stylistic resemblance to Gamma Ray is at times downright startling, you have to let it slide, since the band’s career path has been tightly interwoven with Gamma Ray’s from the very beginning. Drummer Thomas Nack was in fact Gamma Ray’s drummer in their early days, meaning the first half of the nineties, and Kai Hansen played in Iron Savior, as did his Gamma Ray buddy Daniel Zimmermann. As expected, the album opens with an intro that gradually builds the mood until it all spills over into the “Accept-style” bristling The Savior, an excellent choice of opener that instantly kicks a real adrenaline rush of hormones into your bloodstream, and true power metal fanatics will start headbanging on autopilot.
The production is excellent and in line with everything Euro power metal demands! The riffs are venomously cranked and pushed up front, the vocals command them vehemently, decisively and authoritatively, and the rhythm section is perfectly contrasted. The bass lines are by no means trampled under the stomping of the double bass drum, which was often the Achilles’ heel of power metal albums in the past. Speaking of comparisons, Moment In Time and the fastest song on the album, Faster Than All (the title says it all), are what comes closest to old Gamma Ray, while the “gem” Hall Of The Heroes has a little riff surprise in its opening that recalls the epic Grave Digger classic The Round Table. R.U. Ready stands out on the album as a rockin’ “loosened-up” song, where the verses run through a string of thank-yous to the giants of rock music, without whom Piet Sielck and company would have a hard time imagining today’s metal in all its varieties. Another song that stands apart from the rest is the calm, ballad-like Before The Pain, which is not exactly what we’re used to from Iron Savior, but the main thing is that this track, stuffed with solemn bombast and great choices in picking and combining the lead melodies, works fully on the album and in that way keeps up its complete credibility.
“The Landing” is an incredibly mature new studio album from Iron Savior. I can say it’s one of the better things this band has ever put out in its career. Simple as that. Routine, miles on the clock, know-how and experience. Add to that the long break between the previous and the new album, which left plenty of time to pick the best new ideas and finalize them in the best possible way! That’s why this is a new Iron Savior album that’s sworn from head to toe to the band’s basic musical vocabulary, yet at the same time sounds fresh, destructive, and effectively keeps the ideal balance between the epic bombast of predatory melodic hooks and ultra-high-voltage metal punch. All you power metallers simply have to check this one out.
Line-up
Piet Sielck – vocals, guitar
Joachim “Piesel” Küstner – guitar, backing vocals
Jan-Sören Eckert – bass guitar, backing vocals
Thomas Nack – drums, backing vocals
Production
Piet Sielck
Track list
01. Descending (1:05)
02. The Savior (4:48)
03. Starlight (4:51)
04. March of Doom (4:43)
05. Heavy Metal Never Dies (4:14)
06. Moment in Time (5:07)
07. Hall of the Heroes (5:39)
08. R. U. Ready (4:49)
09. Faster than All (5:03)
10. Before the Pain (4:34)
11. No Guts, No Glory (4:31)
