Saturday, March 12, 2016

Coffin Shaker: Primal Fear – Delivering the Black



 
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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