GRAVE DIGGER — Healed By Metal (review)

GRAVE DIGGER — Healed By Metal album cover Album · 2017 · Power Metal Buy this album from MMA partners
4/5 ·
adg211288
With a total of seventeen prior albums under their belt, Grave Digger is one of Germany's most prolific heavy/power metal bands. With Healed by Metal (2017) they're now on their eighteenth full-length release. It's the follow-up to Exhumation - The Early Years (2015), an album of re-recorded material that for me represents the only major blip on the band's track record of delivering albums of a consistently high quality. In terms of actual new studio albums though this is the follow-up to the excellent Return of the Reaper (2014), which I feel is one of the band's best releases. So I go into Healed by Metal with the hope that Exhumation was just a misguided idea and that Grave Digger will still be riding the same high that allowed them to deliver Return of the Reaper a few years ago.

There's definitely enough killer material on offer here to confirm that to be the case, with an early highlight coming in the form of When Night Falls, which may just be my favourite song from the album. This is a surprisingly short release from Grave Digger as it only comes in at around thirty-six minutes without bonus tracks and most individual tracks sit between the three to four minute mark except for the closing Laughing with the Dead which passes five. It's a no frills attached, get in and get the job done brand of songwriting on Healed by Metal and it works well as the album makes me want to listen to it again immediately, with its catchiest choruses still going through my head the way they do. The music itself is classic Grave Digger style heavy/power metal with their trademark edge, though I do think that some parts of the same come across as a little more polished this time, especially regarding some of the lead guitar melodies. Further highlights for me include Call for War, Kill Ritual and Hallelujah.

There's also a portion of the album though that makes me consider Healed by Metal to be a small step down from Return of the Reaper. The opening title track in particular comes across as being a bit cheesy, as any metal song about metal itself tends to be, and doesn't really hook me into the album too well. Things flow better from When Night Falls onward but I'd have to call out Ten Commandments of Metal as another lesser number. Neither is bad but compared to the highlights they do feel like filler, which brings me back around to the album's length. It really could have done with one or two more songs.

A solid release from Grave Digger, Healed by Metal is certain to please fans of their past work and despite some issues it more than satisfies me after I was disappointed by the re-recordings album.
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