MANOWAR — Fighting the World (review)

MANOWAR — Fighting the World album cover Album · 1987 · US Power Metal Buy this album from MMA partners
3/5 ·
Warthur
How's this for some irony: Manowar kicked off their previous album to this, Sign of the Hammer, with the anthem All Men Play On 10, which was basically a declaration that Manowar would never sell out and anyone who pandered to commercialism was a thrall to the evil forces of False Metal... so, naturally, for this followup Manowar signed to a major label and kicked off proceedings with three shamelessly commercial tracks with production values and performances that could have belonged to any generic hair metal band of the era.

Had the banner-bearers of True Metal betrayed us? Well, no, not quite; they might have made a deal with the commercial devil, but from track four (Violence and Bloodshed) onwards the tone of the album shifts rapidly to much more interesting territory, with much of the second side offering up a blend between traditional Manowar bravado and Helloween-ish power metal. It's thanks to this latter part of the album that Fighting the World just about treads water, though I can't help but think that rather than rerecording perfectly good albums like Battle Hymns, Manowar's time these days might be better spent rerecording this one to give us a hair metal-free version of it.

Extra half-star because of the presence of a hilariously bored Orson Welles on narration for Defender - even so, this is only bearable if you skip the first three tracks and kick off with Violence and Bloodshed.
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