July 2023 Feature Release - The Guardians Edition

Placeholder for editing tomorrow, this month's Feature Release is chosen by me and it's a classic band that I never spent a whole lot of time with: Grave Digger. This is apparently one of their stronger classic albums so I'm interested what you all and I have to say about it this month. 

Excellent. I've been meaning to check this one out for a while now.

It is obvious that I am very far removed from the target audience for this album and I really don't like lambasting albums that have been offered up as feature releases because they obviously mean something to the person offering them, but I'm really not sure where to start with what I dislike about Knights of the Cross. I guess the beginning is as good a place as any and, let's face it, the intro is ludicrous, to the point where I actually burst out laughing the first time around. The po-faced intoning of the album's concept by movie-trailer-man and Andrew Lloyd-Webber-esque musical bombast was just too much for me to take and I probably should just have turned it off and walked away at that point.

The thing is that after the silly opening things actually looked up with a rather wicked opening riff to the title track... until the vocals kicked in, that is. I don't like Chris Boltendahl's vocals at all and they even sound like they are about to go out of tune at any time, this is then exacerbated by the power metal staple of a harmonised chorus, a trope that is always guaranteed to get my back up. The album also seems to suffer from a common ailment of concept albums, which is forcing the music to fit the concept rather than the other way round.

I am a history buff myself and am quite keen on the history of the crusades so I was quite hopeful for the album, but oh dear. I hesitate to bring this up and I may be reading too much into it, but there also seems to be a borderline racism within the lyrics - the Muslims are all painted as "fanatic assassins", whereas Richard I is said to be "A man like a Lion, With a generous heart" even though "He executes all prisoners, without regret". This is a concept that is either written by someone who hasn't read a history book or, even worse, has but doesn't care about an accurate portrayal.

The shame about this is that the guitar work is really good. Both the riffing and the soloing are top drawer, but all the power metal window dressing that comes with it just makes it a painful experience for me personally. I've given it a couple of listens now, but I won't be returning to it and Grave Digger will be firmly filed in the bottom drawer marked "None of My Business".

1/5

Excellent choice Xephyr, these days I don't quite feel like it's the strongest '90s release of the band, The Reaper and Tunes of War definitely beat it, but it's a good third choice. Not helped by the Hollywood take on history at times and the sudden shift back to Scottish history again. The way these guys sing about Scotland sometimes you'd swear they were American.

Here's my review:

German power/heavy metal stalwarts Grave Digger have eluded me for most of the many decades I’ve been involved with the metal scene. I guess we simply sit on opposing sides of the metal spectrum but that hasn’t dampened my urge to remove the mystery around them at some point, if only so that I can tick a reasonably important box in my understanding of the classic metal bands. Prior to checking out this month’s feature release my only significant experience with Grave Digger had been through their 1984 debut album “Heavy Metal Breakdown” which I investigated for the Metal Academy podcast many years ago. It saw them delivering a fairly traditional Judas Priest/Accept style of classic heavy metal with a brute of a guitar tone & a few seriously good riffs but unfortunately the song-writing & lyrics were pretty poor which left me feeling a bit flat about the album overall. 1998’s “Knights of the Cross” is a much more highly regarded record though so I’ve gone into this month’s The Guardians feature release hopeful of a more positive outcome.

If the online information is to be believed, Grave Digger headed off in a slightly different direction after the 1980’s with their signature sound being somewhat of a hybrid of power metal & heavy metal. “Knights of the Cross” (Grave Digger’s eighth full-length) is a prime example of that although it’s possibly a touch heavier on the power metal than it is the heavy metal of their early days. The production job is clear & effective with the rhythm guitar tone helping the album to achieve a metal-as-fuck feel without taking the distortion to extreme levels. Interestingly, front man Chris Boltendahl is the only remaining member from Grave Digger’s debut album so it probably shouldn’t be a surprise that they've taken a slightly different path over time. That’s not to say that “Knights of the Cross” sounds like a different band or anything though as it maintains some of the same traits as “Heavy Metal Breakdown” as well as some of the same failings.

As with the debut, Grave Digger keep their riff & song structures very simple & quite generic for the most part, presumably in the interest of giving band leader Boltendahl plenty of room to move as, let’s be honest, this type of music is all about those soaring vocal hooks, isn’t it? Boltendahl’s gruff vocals are a nice change from the higher-register operatic style that we’re so used to hearing from European power metal acts. I’ve never been big on concept albums though as the continued focus on delivering a storyline tends to have an impact of the quality of the music more often than not in my opinion. For this reason I generally find myself ignoring the concept & judging these releases as traditional albums. That’s not all that easy to do with “Knights of the Cross’ though as the themes of The Crusades are presented so blatantly with the lyrics being easily intelligible which makes it hard to ignore their intent. Sadly, I don’t think Grave Digger have improved on their ability write mature lyrics as these are pretty obvious & often kinda dumb which leaves the album relying really heavily on those vocal hooks to carry it through.

So, do those hooks deliver a rewarding album experience? Well, at times they do but this is a very inconsistent record to be honest. I quite like the more mature power metal numbers like the opening title track & epic closer “The Battle of Bannockburn” as well as a few of the heavy metal-oriented numbers such as “Fanatic Assassins”, The Curse of Jacques” & particularly the very solid album highlight “The Keeper of the Holy Grail” but there are also a slew of creative failures included. None of them are truly disastrous but the losses outweigh the wins for mine which leaves “Knights of the Cross” ending up on the wrong side of the acceptability line. In fact, I’d suggest that I slightly prefer “Heavy Metal Breakdown” over this one which might not be all that surprising given my much stronger affiliations with heavy metal over power metal. Fans of German power/heavy metal acts like Running Wild, Rage & Rebellion will no doubt be much more open to a record like this one than I will & there’s unquestionably a lot worse power metal records out there too but that doesn’t make “Knights of the Cross” any more interesting for someone with my particular taste profile.

3/5

Following up the first of many Scottish albums, Knights of the Cross is about the Crusades. Kind of, because Grave Digger manages to sneak in a reference to Scotland again. It's not the most accurate portrayal of the conflicts, but that's not surprising. It's rather heavy towards the post-war inquisition stuff which suggests to me they originally thought they would make something about that.
Knights is a broadly typical Grave Digger album. Aggressive power metal. Definitely not like your Sonata Arcticas and Rhapsodys, but still distinctly within the realm of power metal. On the whole not quite typical. There are riffs under the vocal lines and sometimes you can hear the bassist! While there are your typical power metal material lying around, Grave Digger primarily does either very heavy stuff or very moody, not really ballad type of stuff.
Chris Boltendahl has a very distinct, hard to get used to vocal style. At first you have a very gruff, 10 pack a day vocal style, which aren't really growls, and sort of defy comparisons. On the other, you have a very clean, very melodic style which one would be surprised came from the same person. Boltendahl doesn't really do much of the latter here, at best doing a quiet version of his usual shtick. Choruses are often done in a very thrashy shout style.
The problem with how Knights of the Cross does this is that it kind of flows awkwardly. Grave Digger has this really unfortunate habit of having two songs on an album that sound very samey, here, Monks of War is that to the title track, and they're the first two tracks. Followed by Heroes of this Time, which isn't a great song to begin with, it has a very awkward transition between the verses and the chorus, but worst of all, Monks of War uses "Heroes of this Time" as one of it's lyrics. Could we not have had, instead, say, a song about some minor Muslim commander whom even the Christians respected instead of one of these two? After all he was one of the few people everyone respected at the time. While Fanatic Assassins is a fantastic song, it does feel somewhat strange as the only Arab-centered song.
Like all Grave Digger albums, it takes a while to get used to, and despite the awkward flow, has more than enough good material on the album to make up for it.

4/5