Fans of Axel Rudi Pell can buy this new album without any hesitation. Once again, this band, who started out in the late eighties, has brought us a very good album. If, like me, you’re old enough to have lived in the eighties, and are a metal fan, you might probably still remember Axel Rudi Pell’s work with Steeler (The German Steeler, not to be confused with the band that featured Ron Keel).
Running Wild could be called a dinosaur, because they were formed way back in 1976, and besides a hiatus of some three years between 2009, when they split up, and their reformation in 2011, have kept around, with many personnel changes over these years.
Merely a year has passed since the release of their ‘Shadowmaker’ album. This album seems to go back to their nineties releases, and as far as I’m considered, is not a bad album, but also an album that will not remain in your memory for too long. It’s some standard eighties/nineties metal no more no less.
How he manages to combine them all is a riddle to me, but between his work as a producer and with his bands Casanova/Demon Drive, and Wolfpakk, Michael Voss has found the time to also write an record songs for a next Mad Max album. The career of this band spans some thirty years, although with lots of splits stops and restarts, but this does not show in this brand new album.
Dutch band Vengeance have been around since 1983 already, but if you don’t count the album that was only released in Japan, and the live album, this is only their eleventh album. Line-up changes have been countless over the years, but with one or two constants always returning, that being singer Leon Goewie – he’s been replaced one some occasions, and guitarist Jan Somers. Sadly enough Jan Somers died in 2011 from a heart attack, but his son Timo who had already played in the band together with his fathe
And so, I am again reviewing an album which would normally have been worked on by my revered Death Metal specialist colleague Ivan, due to the fact that our editor-in-chief overlooked passing the album onto him and, because he already had put enough on the poor dude's slate, subsequently put it on mine...using the (absolutely valid) excuse that occasionally all the work is getting at him (of course, that relates in the first place to the daytime job, which sees him left with so little free time he's occasionally sleepwalking on his days off!).
