Unknown Soldier

I was there but I didn't like that kind of music back then, I was probably listening to some slick AOR instead. My metal knowledge didn't really start until a hell of a long time after.

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Metal Wars

Power Metal

Pounding Decibels- A Hard and Heavy History

Oriphiel

When did you first get into Metal?

The Batlord

Quite possibly Manowar's creative peak, Into Glory Ride is like no other album, even among like-minded epic metal bands. It captures a fantasy vibe that is all Vikings, magic, and armies on the march -- and heavy ****ing metal, of course. Possibly their least accessible album (that doesn't suck) with it's slow, thundering riffs that often have little for the average Metallica or Ozzy fan to latch onto, this album is an uncompromising tribute to all things manly and metallic.

Opener "Warlord" could perhaps have been a single, as it's more in line with the kind of traditional metal from Battle Hymns, and is just catchy as all hell -- and that intro of drummer Scott Columbus having relations with a girl of questionable age ("She's only sixteen!") is the dumbest thing to ever be awesome. Its masterfully poetic lyrics about motorcycles, banging broads, and generally not giving a **** about anyone who doesn't get what they're about fit that "theme" perfectly as well. But it's an odd choice to even include on, let alone kick off the album, as the entire rest sounds nothing like it.

The only other song approaching real accessibility is "Gloves of Metal" -- that ****ing riff! -- which I have already declared to be one of the greatest metal anthems of all time.


**** yeah, Eric. **** yeah.

The rest of the album is concerned entirely with fantasy, set to a background of grinding metal gloriousness heavier than a city block. "Secret of Steel", "Gates of Valhalla", and especially "March for Revenge (By the Soldiers of Death)" all perfectly conjure the epic, martial imagery of Conan, without any concessions to subtlety or good taste. If this album doesn't make you want to go out and raise hell with a broadsword, then you're dead inside.

The only duff track on the whole album is "Hatred", a somewhat dull song that doesn't really go anywhere and lasts for entirely too long, but still fits the tone of the album enough that it merely drags a bit, rather than halts the album. And there's just something about the personality of the song that keeps it from being outright skippable filler. On the bright side, there is no bass solo track on the entire record. A fine trade-off as far as I'm concerned.

The aforementioned "March for Revenge" closes Into Glory Ride in brilliant fashion. It's probably the most ambitious song on the album, with a series of interplaying riffs of godlike quality, setting the stage for a stirring tale of battle and victory. Surely a metaphor for the forces of True Metal letting no obstacle stop them in their glorious Crusade. I'm sure fuddy-duddies would deride the mid-point of the song, when it nearly stops for a lament to the death of a beloved comrade in arms, but when Eric Adams declares...


... Only poseurs are not moved. Yes, that means you, *******. **** off.

This was the first Manowar album I ever listened to, and for the longest time it never really resonated with me. It's certainly not the first album I'd recommend to someone new to the band, due to it being one of their least accessible albums, but with time it has become a treasured part of my metal collection. Into Glory Ride is only for the Truest of Metalheads, and everyone else can kiss its perfectly sculpted ass. Hail!

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The Batlord

Continuing from where Into Glory Ride left off, while also adding a diversity that Manowar had never really shown before. Things kick off slow and heavy, with the relentless, vicious power of "Blood of My Enemies" and "Each Dawn I Die", before taking a left turn into speed metal for "Kill with Power", and then the title track is sort of a halfway point between the epic metal of Into Glory Ride, and the straight ahead trad metal of Battle Hymns.

"Army of the Immortals" starts Side B similarly to the previous song, before introducing one of the few bass solo tracks that doesn't actually suck, and then back to slow, grinding heaviness on "Bridge of Death"

Depending on your point of view, this diversity might be seen as an improvement over the the monotony of Into Glory Ride, but personally, it makes the album a less purely atmospheric experience. Regardless, this is a fantastic album, and probably their most consistent -- consistency being almost unheard of for Manowar. The band more or less nail every song, exploring and sometimes even improving on all aspects of their sound in a cohesive way that is almost unique in their notoriously spotty discography.

For any true Manowarrior, Hail to England is an artifact of worship, and simply one of the best heavy/power metal albums of the decade. If you don't live in America (where the band sadly does not have a distribution deal, making their records almost impossible to track down in a physical record store) and you consider yourself a True Metalhead, then you owe it to yourself to buy this album and wear it the **** out.

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The Batlord

I don't know why Manowar so often releases singles with material you can hear off the next album. What's the point of buying a single if you can just skip it without missing anything? Both "All Men Play on 10" and "Mountains" are on their next full-length, Sign of the Hammer, making this release unnecessary. Still, those are two of the best songs from that record, so I suppose if you were a desperate Manowar fan in 1984, and you just had to know what the band was up to at all times, then this would have been mana from the heavens.

"All Men Play on 10" is probably more hard rock than anything they'd released since... possibly ever. It's definitely metal, but Manowar had never really released a song quite like this. Lyrically, it's not so different from their Battle Hymns material, but considering how much their lyrics had come to be dominated by fantasy, it's kind of odd for Manowar's first taste of the new album to deviate so much. Still, Manowar are a band who celebrates machismo, so the mentality of a song like "All Men Play on Ten" is hardly out of character, and it kicks some serious ass. I've certainly played this song more than a few million times when on a Manowar binge.

"Mountains" is far more in line with their then current sound. It's not quite as great as earlier epic songs, but it evokes an atmosphere that would have fit right in on Into Glory Ride, and when it gets going it's as thunderous as anything they've ever recorded.

Again, if you already have Sign of the Hammer, then you don't need this at all, but it's still pretty cool all by itself.

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Unknown Soldier

Well I was always into the well known 70s stuff like Zeppelin, Alice Cooper and Deep Purple in the 1980s. At that time I was only into the popular commercial metal band of the day like Van Halen, Scorpions and Def Leppard and finally got into the NWOBHM in the 1990s, but it wasn't until the 00's that I finally got into metal properly and that includes most of its sub-genres including most of the extreme metal styles as well. Megadeth were probably my gateway into extreme metal and all the goodies that went with it.

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Metal Wars

Power Metal

Pounding Decibels- A Hard and Heavy History

Oriphiel

I don't know why, but I got the impression that you were a big metalhead back in the day. Anyway, better late than never.

And to Batlord, Thor > Manowar. Even though they started off pretty glam, they had the look and the sound years before Manowar had even recorded their debut. Plus, they're just way more fun to listen to.

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The Batlord

The Triumph of Steel (1992)

Alright, I'm kinda drunk and back listening to Manowar, so let's do this...

1. Achilles, Agony and Ecstasy in Eight Parts - 28:37: Holy ****, why? I've hated this song ever since the first time I heard it. Manowar are a trashy-as-**** band, and attempting a 30-minute "epic" is just so laughable that it's not even almost Spinal Tap-ish. It's just straight-up Spinal Tap. ****, even Spinal Tap would never attempt such an obviously ****ing terrible idea.

I know it will just degenerate into arbitrary solos from every member of the band that will just be a series of arbitrary sections, awkwardly welded together in a self-indulgent display of uber-metal excess. I'd love it if it weren't thirty minutes of ear pain. I'm going to review the rest of the album normally, but this one song I'm going to do all by itself, since it's album-length. God help me I hate this song.

One minute in, and after an intro it kicks off with a pretty-decent-but-far-from-brilliant riff. If this was a normal-length song, I'd say it was probably going to be good filler, but I know otherwise, so...

Man, three minutes in and it feels like a heavily mediocre song has just flown by without accomplishing anything, but now we drift into some melodic, almost ambient... keyboards? I don't know. But it's boring, and Eric Adams's vocals have never sounded so silly. That might not be true, since this is Manowar, but on this song, it is what it is.

I didn't know this, but this was the first album without Ross the Boss on guitar. I don't know how much he contributed to songwriting, but considering Manowar's decent into relative mediocrity after Kings of Metal, I have to assume he was a major part of the band. In the SEVENTH MINUTE, new guitarist David Shenkle (in his only appearance on record) plays a solo which sounds like he might as well have been playing the American National Anthem. It's boring, it's pointless, and it... I can't say it kills the momentum of the song, since it never had any, but it's the lowest point so far.

And now we have a drum solo... ****, nine minutes in? And of course, it's pointless and self-indulgent. There's nothing to enjoy about this. It's just listening to some guy bang on his kit. Nine minutes in, and the song hasn't even been interrupted by pointless wank. It's not even wank, since wank implies some kind of skill, whereas this is just a bunch of guys jumping the shark so atmospherically that I'd be surprised if they didn't require space suits just to survive.

Escape velocity has officially been reached.

Twelve minutes in and the drum solo is still ongoing, but now with some boring guitar to back it up. Guitar is now gone, and the drums are trying to do something martial, I guess to be all Trojan War and ****... and where the **** did that flute come from? I'm so indifferent to this piece of crap that I didn't even remember there was a flute.

And now Eric Adams is talk/whispering in order to sound epic, but it just comes across as... well, Great Whites are glancing into the sky in befuddlement.

Fifteen minutes in and it's not even dragging, since it leaves so little of an impression that I can't even be bothered to immerse myself in it. **** off with this ****, Manowar.

Around 16:30 they just totally ripped off that riff when Metallica's "Battery" switches from acoustic (or whatever) into thrash. If I wasn't actively trying to listen to this I probably wouldn't even have noticed, so boring is this song.

I guess this is a more traditionally metal part of the song, since the whole band is playing, and Eric Adams is singing, but the quality of what's going on is basically so unimpressive that it may as well have been on Gods of War. WTF, Manowar? WTF?

And there, around the twenty minute mark, is the dull bass solo that I've been waiting for. Joey DeMaio is famous for his pointless bass solos, and this is no less awful than anything from previous albums, and is possibly even worse since it's so laidback... cause epicness?

**** this ****. I'm going for a piss and a smoke.

I'm back. So where are we now? The twenty-five-minute mark, and another generic Manowar song has been stuffed inbetween the pointless solos. Not once have I been engaged by this track. I've only ever managed to make it through the whole thing a few times, but never has my initial impression been changed.

This song ****ing blows. Just... blows. Two-and-a-half-minutes left. Just end already, so I can review the actual album.

And just in case you needed further evidence that the band had no idea how to write a thirty-minute epic, the song just fades out rather than actually ending. Not even any kind of resolution, just fading into nothingness, exactly how it began. This is seriously one of the lowest points of the band's entire catalog. And that's ****ing saying something.


As to the rest of the album (you may as well just treat it as two records lumped together)...


It almost saves The Triumph of Steel. If it weren't for the absurdity of "Achilles" turning this album into a mutant beast all its own, I'd say it was the transitional album between the doofy awesomeness of Kings of Metal and the middle-of-the-road decentness of Louder than Hell. It basically copies the anthemic, occasionally epic-in-the-style-of-early-Manowar-style of the former, while exhibiting the lack of inspiration which turned the former into just another Manowar album.

There are some truly cool songs on here -- most notably the meathead glory of "Metal Warriors" -- but others are bogged down by overlong intros -- most notably the unintentionally quasi-racist, Native American mumbling of the first minute-and-a-half of "Spirit Horse of the Cherokee", an otherwise awesome track -- or just a lack of proper editing, resulting in unfocused songs which attempt, but fail to recapture the epic atmosphere of Into Glory Ride and Hail to England.

The ass-end of The Triumph of Steel has no truly bad songs (though also almost no good riffs), but also pretty much no songs that can compete with the best of their previous releases. To be honest though, if you attempt to listen to this record front to back it can be an endurance test due to "Achilles", but if you're like me (and you ****ing should be) then you can just pretend that the album starts with "Metal Warriors" and be left with a highly decent album that succeeds at nothing about as much as it fails at nothing.

I think the band had blown much of their load with their first three albums, started treading water with Sign of the Hammer and Fighting the World, unexpectedly regained their passion and came out swinging hard with Kings of Metal, but had again lost inspiration with The Triumph of Steel. Perhaps a combination of desperation and egotism led them down the road to an ill-conceived and vomit-inducingly-executed "epic", whose scope left them with too little time to concentrate on the rest of the album. But a mediocre Manowar album is still pretty fun, and I'm a fiend, so I'll take what I can get.

I give this album a solid "meh".




Eh, **** it, you might as well... just to say you did.

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The Batlord

Some call this the lost gem of Manowar's 80's period. I guess that's kinda true, but there is still a reason why Sign of the Hammer was lost in the first place: it was a noticeable step down from the glory of their first three albums, and added nothing creatively to the sound they had developed on those releases.

The A-side is definitely strong, if not so much as previously. "All Men Play on 10" is gloriously idiotic, and one of my most-played Manowar tracks, but while it bears some resemblance to the heavy, epic metal of Into Glory Ride and Hail to England, the song treads on much more traditional metal ground; the next song, "Animals", backpedals even further. But both tracks also rule, so my disappointment is minimal.

Closing out the first half are "Thor (The Powerhead)" and "Mountains", which are much heavier and atmospheric, conjuring the same Conan the Barbarian vibe as the last two albums. They're also strong, but can't quite touch previous highs. At this point the album is basically just a slightly less good version of what the band had already been doing.

But the B-side is where the band drops the ball: the title track and "The Oath" are pretty nondescript traditional metal, and aren't much more than decent filler; "Thunderpick" is the obligatory ****ty bass solo before the last song on more Manowar albums than I care to think of, and is no more memorable than any of its inbred siblings; and while "Guyana (Cult of the Damned)" is a step up from the last three tracks, it's just a not-quite-as-good version of "Thor" and "Mountains", but at least it ends the album on a semi-strong note (and opening line, "We thank you for the Kool-Aid, Reverend Jim" is pretty hilarious).

There's really not much more to say about Sign of the Hammer. It's a decent footnote in Manowar's discography, marking the exact place where the band started running out of steam, and only really offers four songs of note, which are still no more than a retread of better albums.

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The Batlord

Finally finished the full-length albums, now I just have to do the five billion singles, live albums, compilations (cause why the **** not), and bootlegs. Not to mention track down the Hell on Earth videos/DVDs. This project will likely never end, but I doubt there will be another Manowar tribute as comprehensive.

BTW, I'd rather do those Hell on Earth DVDs without just watching the concert footage. I'd like to have access to all the features, and it would be nice not to have to shell out $593,082 on Amazon, so... can you pirate fully functional DVDs and not just the main footage?

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