20. Manowar Battle Hymns 1982 (Liberty)
Heavy metal
I feel the sound in a metal way.
Album
1982 was such a great year with so many albums vying for a top 20 slot and some of the choices that I made here, ended up being in favour of albums and bands that made an everlasting impact on metal, rather than albums that were musically better. The Manowar debut was one such album that fell into this first category and beat albums by bands such as the sophomore of Raven, the only album ever put out by NWOBHM band Shiva, Spanish metal in Baron Rojo and a nearly there album by Whitesnake were just some of the albums beaten by the Manowar debut here. The name Manowar usually evokes strong opinions amongst metalheads and these opinions often denote Manowar as being the complete anthithesis of everything they see great about metal from a negative viewpoint, but this is equally countered by others (such as me) who see the band as being the epitome of everything metal. I consider myself a big Manowar fan, not so much in their actual music, but more in them being a genuine celebration of metal and all its established clichés. Manowar would go on to be so influential on 1980s metal, that they can probably be seen as the principal motivators of the soon to be ‘power metal’ genre (easily one of my favourite sub-metal genres) making them pretty groundbreaking in what they were doing. The band were formed in New York 1980 by bassist and band leader Joey DeMaio, who soon recruited highly reputable guitarist Ross the Boss ex-Dictators and ex-Shakin Street a French metal band who once appeared earlier in this journal (see 1978 review) drummer Donnie Hamzik and finally vocalist Eric Adams, an ex-butcher who claimed to have a five-and-a-half octave vocal range! The criteria of this new band was quite simple and that was to be the loudest metal band in the world and also the truest, and in my opinion that’s exactly what they would achieve over their next several albums. Manowar were never a band to be taken too seriously and their debut album
Battle Hymns which features here, is certainly encumbered by a number of badly used metal clichés and less than impressive song writing ability on certain songs, but the pure and potential epicness of the band is there from the word go, and this talent covers over these cracks making
Battle Hymns an interesting ‘power metal starter album’. The album starts with “Death Tone” with its Kiss influenced “Detroit Rock City” opener and in general the song has that Kiss aroma throughout, but Manowar play louder than Kiss ever did though. By the time of the excellent second track ‘the celebration of metal anthem’ “Metal Daze” you really know what this band are all about and that is quite simply epic metal that’s here to stay! The band then truly blend speed metal into their powerful repertoire on “Fast Taker” the best track on the album, before the album then dips into clichéd and patchy song choices, but there’s still enough here to keep you engaged. The band though get things right on the album closer, the epic title track “Battle Hymn” all hail glorious metal!