In my initial post I was considering HammerFall as sort of disingenous. As if they, or a record company, had deliberately crafted a watered down version of power metal for easy marketing. That's not how I see them anymore. Glory To The Brave-era HammerFall aren't Pat Boone at all; they're Nickelback. What I mean by that is that, like Nickelback, their music is (in my opinion, of course) a generic echo of something classic. Just like with Nickelback, there's nothing feigned at all about HammerFall's love for the classics, and they'll in fact go far out of their way to give the music they love more exposure.* And, like Nickelback, they don't seem to actually understand why the greats were so great, or if they do, they haven't figured out how to bring that into their own music. Taken in that light, the fact that Joachim spent a few years singing for a touring incarnation of Warlord seems not just on brand, but inevitable. I'd wager he got roughly the same level of thrill out of "holy shit, I'm performing with Warlord!" as from "holy shit, five hundred people are screaming along to my song!"
The fanboying over early US power metal is about the most distinct impression I get listening to this album. Along with being quite tired of these particular songs. The one other main thing I notice is how often Glory dances around the edges of something good. I kind of go through the same arc every time I start the record from the beginning since "The Dragon Lies Bleeding" at first could be mistaken for actual good (to me) PM. Punchy riff, powerful singer, and I appreciate the way the chorus has so many words. I read somewhere that a key trait of power metal is having a lot of notes relative to number of chords, which might explain why as someone who mostly pays attention to vocals, I'm appreciating chatty, wordy choruses in the sub-genre. This rocks, doesn't it? It kinda does, except... except... By about midway through verse two I'm nitpicking. Why is the narrator throwing in rhymes about returning home right in the middle of the trip to the promised land or whatever? Why is the target of the song required to close their eyes? Why do you insist on stringing together pharase in lieu of storytelling that makes sense? And why am I paying so much attention to the lyrics at all? Ah, yeah, it's because the riff never developed beyond doing its thing over and over, and the chorus lost its appeal after being repeated over and over without new wrinkles beyond a key change. Back to my fixation** on whether or not a song has one extra element to push it over the top. "The Dragon Lies Bleeding" has most of the elements of a good song, but it's not quite there for me. Once the record follows that up with the "The Metal Age," a song in which I am physiological incapable of taking the slightest interest and whose chorus only has three words, I'm checked out.
Elsewhere on Glory, HammerFall are a bit more ambitious. As much as I trashed it before, I don't particularly dislike "I Believe" any more; I just don't love it the way I do enjoy many equally cheesy ballads like "A Tale That Wasn't Right." I considered trying to dissect what exactly Helloween are using for their special "something," but then I realized that I feel like "I Believe" - purely based on vocal approach here - actually sounds more to me like a B-tier Scorpions ballad than anything else.*** Even if I don't totally love the title track, I recognize that, as summarized last time, it's packed with good ideas, musically speaking. "Hammerfall" at least tries to have a few things happening. I mentioned last time that the wordy pre-chorus and the down-tuned counterpoint of a chorus playing off each other is nice, but in that context what I'm digging the most is the soaring mini-melody that ends the verses. There are even some actual attempts to tell a story a few times on this record, and yes, one of them is that bullshit crusader song, but that song's second half does have a solo and final crescendo that stretch towards epic. Immediately following is "Stone Cold," featuring actual world building in the verses that matches the slow groove; I wish the chorus were something... different in some way. Or even with better words than "man or machine?" (rhymed inexplicably with "dream"), I could maybe stick with the same non-tune and high/low dichotomy. If I could somehow grab the better parts of the bullshit crusader song and use them to punch up the weaker bits of "Stone Cold," I think there's an all-timer of a track in there.
But Glory To The Brave is the record that it is. And for a record without much obvious stuff I deeply dislike, I cannot emphasize how eager I am to get back to not listening to or thinking about it. Good thing my whole agenda here is see different variations on the PM form, because if a deep exploration of power metal yielded only records like this one, I would be out. Instead, we'll move on to hopefully some more distinct things.****
Favorite track: "Glory To The Brave"
Runner up: "Hammerfall"
Least favorite track: "The Metal Age"
Rating: 2/5
Will I come back to HammerFall?
Nope! Even if their post-debut material has stronger songwriting, I doubt they'll offer anything I can't get somewhere else.
Things I learned about power metal:
- Despite being a non-fan of unpolished gruff vocals, war songs, chest-pounding, and the '80s as a whole, vintage USPM is scratching a surprising number of itches for me.
- Including more words is a key element of my favorite kind of uplifting PM chorus.
Next: Revisiting Helloween's The Dark Ride, whenever I get around to it!
*During the height of my fixation with Alice In Chains, my first time after many near-misses getting to see Jerry Cantrell live was when he was opening for Nickelback. By all accounts they were constantly doing stuff like extending his time slot (maybe they do that for all their opening acts, I don't know), devoting large portions of the stage banter during their own show to how much they enjoyed watching Jerry's, giving interviews raving about what a thrill it was the few times they were able to get him on stage to play an AiC song with them, etc.
**Well, not just mine. Many, many people vaguely
wave their hands while involving that special "something" as the thing
that X has but Y doesn't.
***Joacim's singing accent seems so German. If he's Swedish like the rest of the band are, I assume he grew up as fluent in English as in his native tongue, but since it amuses me to believe that he learned the language entirely from listening to Scorpions records, I choose to continue to believe that.
****
But first, a fairly obvious way to get to "what if Helloween, but heavier and more modern sounding?"
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