Out of the classic Manowar albums (1982 thru 1990), you could make a case for this one being the best, or at least the most consistent. Kings of Metal‘s best moments are better, but it’s worse moments are far worse. I can never get comfortable with that album, despite the greatness of “Hail and Kill” and “Blood of the Kings”. Listening to it side to side is like sleeping on a luxurious hammock that has several large holes in it. There are no Manowar albums with all killer and no filler, so don’t look for them, but there’s a difference between normal crappy and “Pleasure Slave” crappy. On Sign of the Hammer I merely skip a few tracks. On Kings of Metal I actually deleted several mp3s so I can pretend they don’t exist.

Anyway…

1. Shitty songs: “All Men Play on 10” and “Thunderpick”. The first is an annoying Spinal Tappish self-parody – Manowar is at their best when they’re playing with absolute conviction, not winking at the audience. The second is four minutes of unlistenable bass guitar masturbation. Can someone keep Joey DeMaio away from those higher frets? It’s like giving Bashar Al-Assad access to white phosphorous. It’s nothing personal, he just does not use them for the betterment of humanity.

2. Good songs: “Animals” and “The Oath” – really fun high-energy rockers, the first reminding me of KISS, the second a NWOBHM inspired speed metal song. Not much songwriting going on here, just a shot of Manowar’s larger than life energy, like an Epipen in your arm.

3. Great songs: “Thor, the Powerhead” and “Sign of the Hammer.” Holy crap these rule. Elaborate early power metal, rivaling anything done by Manilla Road and Fates Warning. Great vocals, great instrumentation, and great songwriting equals two bona fide classics. If Manowar sounded like this consistently I’d quit making fun of Joey DeMaio’s ego forever, because he’d have earned it.

4. “Mountains”: the standout track and one of the most incredible moments of Manowar’s career. A long-winded ballad that finishes on a massive emotional crest. This is the sort of song you point to when trying to convert someone on a band. Eric Adams has never sounded better than this.

5. The outlier: “Guyana – Cult of the Damned”. An odd doom metal song that I don’t hate, but it doesn’t really do anything to sell me. Some more bass shredding, some heavy doomy riffs, and a bizarre chorus that sounds like the band flailing around in free-time. An odd lyrical choice for Manowar, too. Just a strange, strange song all around.

I’m torn on whether to recommend this as a first Manowar album. One other thing is that Sign of the Hammer opens with terrible cheese while Kings of Metal opens with the great “Wheels of Fire.”

As is always the case with Manowar, you can get a much better album by just deleting all the garbage and dogshit. The trouble is: sometimes this results in a 20 minute long album. Sign of the Hammer fares better, you still get 33:00 or so of good stuff.

What do you do when you have some new songs, but not enough for an album? When you’ve got unreleased tracks, but not enough for a compilation? When you’ve got a bunch of band members hanging around the studio, but they’re not seriously interested in a reunion? In 2010, Danish power metal band Iron Fire’s answer was to “do all three simultaneously.”

It’s hard to figure out exactly what sort of album this is – most database type websites consider it a new studio release, but most of it was written in 2003, and was present in rough form in various demos. It’s mixed up with a few, and all of them are recorded by the band’s former members: and it’s a metal band, so there’s a ton of former members.

I don’t know why they bothered tracking down every random asshole who was ever in this band to contribute instruments – you can’t hear any difference. The drums are very triggered and mechanical. The guitars are a pulverising backwash of distortion. You’re not going to be smiling and thinking “hey, that’s Morten Plenge on drums!” Everyone’s performance sounds fairly interchangeable, except for vocalist Martin Steene, who has always humanised some very inhuman music and continues to do so here.

The songs are all fairly strong, although it’s clear why some of them never appeared on a real Iron Fire album. “The Phantom Symphony” is long-winded, but contains a lot of tasty treats, tacky horror-movie obsessed lyrics aside. “Back to the Pit” and “The Graveyard” are just the usual fare. “Crossroads” is a ballad that serves to break up the relentless speed that dominates most of the album.

The new songs are better. “Reborn to Darkness” has a jangly, progressive edge to its riff approach. “Still Alive” lays on the quadtracked guitars, sounding more like Nevermore than a European power metal band. “My Awakening” is fast and powerful as fuck, probably the most immediate and memorable track on the album, with some well-placed death metal vocals in the chorus. The bonus version of the album contains an orchestral version of “Crossroads” and another re-recorded song called “Afterlife”, which sounds pleasant enough.

The presentation and production is good, but it’s not as much as a retrospective as you’d hope for – this is a VERY modern sounding Iron Fire. I hope you like downtuned guitars and death metal vocals. Ultimately I don’t know how necessary something like this is – Metalmorphosized is something aimed at the band’s hardcore fans, and they’d probably be more satisfied by hunting down the demos that these songs originally appeared on. Still one of the more memorable compilation-cum-studio-cum-reunion albums I’ve heard.

Reign in Blood has some great tracks – and not just the two everyone remembers, either.

“Epidemic,” for example, has an addictive syncopated gallop riff that’s worth tuning down to Eb so you can play along. “Postmortem” is punchy and powerful, and perfectly leads into “Raining Blood” (the two will be forever linked in the fans’ minds, due to a mastering error that put the first verse of “Raining Blood” at the end of “Postmortem”).

But much of it is an unfocused riff salad, full of tracks that don’t come off as songs but 2-3 minute explosions of energy. “Epidemic” is riff, verse, riff, verse, verse, break, riff, verse, fin! “Criminally Insane” is another half a song that speeds up and slows down in a spontaneous, unplanned way – there’s not really a musical thru-line of tension and release. It’s like it was written by a Turing-incompatible computer.

“Necrophobic” is super fast, but sounds more like four guys trying to set a land speed record than music.

The album’s greatest moment is “Angel of Death”, which has great riffs, a crushing middle break, and lyrics about Nazis. I refuse to believe this was not a marketing strategy. When you’re a female pop duo (think tATu or The Veronicas), you’ve got to have people thinking you’re lipstick lesbians. When you’re a metal band, you’ve got to have people thinking you’re Nazis or Satanists. It worked for KISS and Black Sabbath, so why not Slayer?

The album’s so heavy, fast, and evil that it’s almost overpowering…but I wish it was more consistent. Great riffs share flat space with dull “speed-pick one note until you die of boredom” time fillers. Heavy metal classics rub shoulders with tracks that don’t even sound finished. It’s very uneven moment to moment and minute to minute. Even the vaunted lyrics frequently dissolve turn into shouted tirades about Satan and slashings.

I like Dave Lombardo’s drumming. This is basically the benchmark for metal drumming in 1986. Nobody else was playing this fast or this technically – except perhaps for Dark Angel’s Gene Hoglan. The production is also quite good – sharp and clinical, with clear and crisp allocation of sonic space between the kicks, the rhythm guitars, the what-have-you. The whole affair clocks in at under 30 minutes – say what you will about it, but it does not overstay its welcome.