I love Primal Fear. I don’t care much for Power Metal, but I
love Primal Fear. They satisfy me on a number of levels: they’re catchy, and
they’re fun, and they are memorable. For me at least, as I’ve certainly seem
more than a few people state the exact opposite of my favorable position on the
band. But I picked up Jaws of Death in
late 1999 and was pretty much instantly in love. Despite that, I’ve actually
missed a pretty large swath of the Primal career, mostly due to my general
disinterest in Power Metal as a whole. I like a few albums over the span of
that genre, but I don’t pay enough attention to it to feel a need to sample new
bands or too many different releases. I don’t know Primal Fear to the extent
that I know which albums came in which order, but I had a three record love
affair with the band spanning Jaws of
Death, Nuclear Fire and Black Sun.
And then, it was over. Primal Fear and I went our separate
ways, an amiable split, but one that resulted in me missing several records,
apparently. I still play those three golden oldies occasionally, and I find
myself grinning and enjoying every second of them, my memory surprisingly
sharp. I have obtained all of the other albums, but as I am a music hoarder,
I’ve yet to hear them. I was legitimately excited about 2014’s Delivering the Black, and then it was
January of 2016, and that albums’ follow up, Rulebreaker, was being released. Damn it, I thought, they just put
out an album that I still haven’t heard; so I had to hear it. Now, I can’t stop
listening to it.
Primal Fear takes me back to a time and place in my life
that I am always glad to revisit musically. At the absolute risk of being that
guy who talks about how music was so much better back then, the late 90s and
the early 2000s provided me with some of my favorite records and is generally
viewed as a terrific time in my musical life, and Primal Fear was a part of
that for sure. I’d discovered them during my time in Germany, and spent a
number of conversations in the basement of Mr. Music in Bonn talking about them
with the guy behind the counter. Even back then not very interested in Power
Metal, Primal Fear struck me as combining stalwarts Priest and Maiden into one
complete band, and to me at that time that was a huge plus. Primal Fear have
been a consistently solid band from their catalog that I’m familiar with as
well.
My general understanding of Primal Fear is that they
committed that ever-unforgivable sin of becoming somewhat popular, and so the
usual Internet response that I see to them is that they clearly are a terrible
band, because otherwise they wouldn’t be popular, or that they aren’t ‘true
Power Metal.’ Hilarious. I guess not being overly concerned with Power Metal is
a blessing in this case.
Delivering the Black contains
some great, fast jams like “Rebel Faction,” “Alive and On Fire,” and
“Inseminoid,” possibly the best track on the record. Lots of other good ones
too, but I gather some of them are bonus tracks, like “The Man Without Shadow,”
so they may not be on all versions of this. By now, the story of singer Ralf
Scheepers having almost been the guy to replace Halford in Judas Priest is old
news, but ol’ Ralf still sounds sharp and on point as ever. The guitar work for
the band has always had a Priest-y slant to it, and I recall years ago
encountering a lot of press claiming that Primal Fear was the band Sheepers
started to show the Judas Priest camp they made the wrong decision by going
with Tim Owens. At this moment in time, I think we have to wonder if that ever
actually mattered, as Owens’ tenure with Priest was very short and they didn’t
exactly move backwards when Halford rejoined the band.
Everything about this album is pretty catchy: soaring
vocals, those great, memorable choruses, some fairly lofty guitar work. The
tracklist follows what I’ve always assumed was the standard Power Metal breakdown:
some fast, some in that midtempo range, a slow jam or two. German accents lead
to a giggle when the more ballad-y track “Born With a Broken Heart” comes
along, and nine minute “One Night In December” is the ambitious centerpiece
tune. Not being a real fan of the genre, I can’t ever really comment on Primal
Fears’ standing in it, whether they’re “good” or not, but in the current age of
Internet Contrarianism, I doubt it would really matter anyway. I love this
band, and I think they’re a ton of fun. I think the best way I can describe
them is that they are a band that, if the weather is nice and you had them on
in the car with the windows rolled down, they would add to your level of
happiness. And, if you got into a staring match with some of the Blind Guardian
crowd at a red light, you’d feel like the vastly cooler guy. That’s quality.
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