Sara Hammerzmith

It’s been three years since HammerFall’s last album “Infected” was released and in the meantime Joacim has been doing Rock of Ages, Oscar’s been writing a book and they’ve released a wine. But now they band has returned – and they are stronger than ever.

“(r)Evolution” is the ninth album in line and contains 11 tracks + bonsutracks on certain versions. I must admit, I did have fairly high expectations on the album itself, and I anticipated the album a lot before getting it. I got myself the digipack version with “Demonized” as a bonus track, and while I absolutely HATE digipacks (we can talk about this some other time) I love touching the cover. The texture they got on it makes you able to basically TOUCH Hector. Love it!

When listening to the album, the first thing that strikes me is that this album is very, VERY HammerFall. Imagine “Glory to the Brave” meeting “Legacy of Kings” and you got it. While “Hector’s Hymn” is a powerful opener, and it got some of the most EPIC back-chanting-vocals I ever heard, you can hear in the lyrics pretty clearly all the references to the past. I suppose this is intentional – almost like Hector’s resurrection.

I might add, for those of you who don’t know. Hector is their mascot, it’s basically the guy with the hammer on the cover.

While the CD is very strong, it’s still a bit… too familiar. They haven’t exaclty literally re-used the riffs,  “Hearts on Fire” meets “Blood Bound” (“Live Life Loud“), you gota bit of “Templars of Steel” in “Et Inferis” and I could really go on forever. It’s not the exact same – but it’s still not new, you know? I must admit – I absolutely LOVE the idea of having James Michael singing in “We Won’t Back Down”. It fits smoothly, and just adds to the song.

A song I must bring up here is “Origins”. And what is it I love about it? I think you already know. The acapella part. After the guitarsolo, they sing the whole chorus once completely acapella before losing it and hammering on as usual. While this is very typical HammerFall still, it caught my attention to the extent that I dare call this the best song on the album, in my personal book at least. The arrangement is absolutely perfect.

Well – all in all I guess I can just repeat what I’ve said many times. This is pretty much as much HammerFall you can get, and it’s going back to their roots with a lot of the material. But it was good. I’m gonna give them that. They still know how to deliver, even though they didn’t bring that much new to the table.

// Sara

This entry was posted on August 28, 2014 at 9:07 pm and is filed under CDs, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.