Kev Rowland
Named of course after the Black Sabbath album, in some ways it is strange to think that Mob Rules have now been going for more than 20 years, with ‘Savage Land’ coming out in 1999. Recorded on the ‘Beast Reborn’ tour, this is the band’s first live album, capturing their new guitarist Florian Dyszbalis. Apart from some niggly issues with the second guitarist role, the band has been incredibly stable over the last ten or so years, while of course singer Klaus Dirks has been there since the very beginning back in 1994. It must be said I prefer my live albums to sound as if they were all recorded straight from the desk, no overdubs or corrections, with audience sound captured on ambient microphones, so I can imagine myself there in the crowd. Yes, I know there are very few live albums released like that, but I can live with knowing bad notes will have been corrected in the studio (and in the case of ‘Live & Dangerous’, one of the truly great live albums of all time, there are still arguments over how much of that was truly live, with producer Visconti saying 75% of it was in the studio), but I hate live albums where there are fades between songs. Guess what we have here…
Putting that to one side, Mob Rules are on form, with singer Dirks in very fine voice indeed. Although they are a power metal band, they use keyboards more than many, but never to the extent to move them out of the genre. The real issue with Mob Rules is rarely in the performance but more often in the quality of the songs themselves, and such is the case here. It is an enjoyable listen, well recorded and produced, but there is little or nothing here which makes me want to come back to it time and again. The album makes me smile, and I enjoyed listening to it, and would certainly go and see the band if they were ever in my area (somewhat unlikely even before the coronavirus), but can’t imagine turning back to it time and again through choice. Fan of the band and of the genre itself will undoubtedly get a great deal from this, but it veers more to the “okay” end of the spectrum than “essential”