IRON SAVIOR — Iron Savior (review)

Album · 1997 · Power Metal

4/5 · 2016-10-05
Kingcrimsonprog

Helloween’s family tree has given us a lot of great musical moments over the years. If you are interested in that band, you can follow the members in and out of that Teutonic institution and find quite a lot of great bands to get into. Not only can you follow a line of logic to Gamma Ray and Freedom Call, or backwards to Blind Guardian at a stretch. Almost anywhere you look there’s some cool band that probably suits your tastes.

One of the great bands you can find on this musical treasure hunt is Germany’s Iron Savior, formed by Kai Hansen, Piet Sielck and Thomen Stauch. They’re a melodic Power Metal band with Sci-Fi themed lyrics and a concept about a self-aware spaceship. Yeah… not exactly wizards and dragons anymore.

Opening with a military march style intro and dual guitar harmonies with an almost Queen flavour on opener ‘The Arrival’ the album lulls you in, before bursting out of the traps with the first proper song ‘Atlantis Falling;’ an up-tempo rocker with that heavier-than-NWOBHM, lighter-than-Thrash style of riffing, some bouncy drumming with lots of space and breaks to show off in, a slightly adventurous and atypical song structure without being outright proggy, and a rather unique vocal style within the subgenere. This is no Bruce Dickinson or Geoff Tate copycat, this is something different. Its also got an absolutely delicious guitar solo that displays everything great about Power Metal; the feel, melody and fun abound.

This song sets up the feel of the whole album, you’ve got driving,forward pressing drums creating a sense of urgency, you’ve got quick chuggy riffs and you’ve got barked low pitched vocals then it gets offset by (sometimes effects-laiden) catchy clean vocal sections with anthemic sing-along choruses and elevated to greatness in the mid-sections once the guitar solos come in and really take things from good to great. There’s one piano ballad in the middle, but otherwise its variations on fast and faster, simple and slightly adventurous, but all within a reasonably similar framework. Depending on what mood you’re in you may call that samey. I call it focused and consistent.

Highlights include the fun catchy title track which feels somewhere between Judas Priest’s Delivering The Goods and Motley Crue’s Live Wire during the verses before going off-track with its mid-paced robotic chorus, as well as the very Blind Guardian flavoured ‘Riding On Fire’ and the Hansi Kürsch guest spot ‘For The World.’ Although to be honest, its all pretty unskippable.

The band would later go on to new line-ups, move further out of the shadows of other bands and become more of a full on real band than a fun side-project supergroup of sorts, but this strong and fun debut is still essential listening for fans of the band and the genre at-large. Piet never needed the other guys to deliver his vision, but its damn nice that he chose to back then, and damn fun we can still listen to it now. Highly recommended.