Doro - Raise Your Fist
Gather ‘round, kids. Uncle Ychoril is gonna tell you a story about the old days of Metal. Way back in the days before Death Metal, long before the likes of Doris Yeh (Chthonic) and Angela Gassow (Arch Enemy) were even jailbait, there was one true Metal Queen. That was Doro Pesch, the lead vocalist of Warlock. Back in the ’80s, I knew guys who literally spent close to thirty bones to get a poster of her imported from Germany. I wasn’t one of them. Thirty bucks was way more than I could conveniently afford for a poster. Doro Pesch was the hottest real Metal chick there was. Lita Ford didn’t count because none of the music she played was really Metal. It was L.A. Butt Rock played by a chick, which made it marginally more acceptable because she was the best looking Butt Rocker out there. That was until Lorraine Lewis of Femme Fatale showed up and made everyone realize that Lita Ford looked like a man with breast implants. It’s easy to be hot when your competition is Blackie Lawless - literally. But I digress… Doro Pesch was hot in the ’80s. Unfortunately, this is 2013 and Doro is on the wrong side of forty years old (I’m being generous, mostly because I’m there too). The glamour shot photographs and the paintings of her in epic poses (and wearing some pretty revealing outfits) that adorn her album covers can’t hide the fact that she’s old enough to be somebody’s grandmother now. Even though she is still in pretty good shape physically, it’s been a long time since Burning the Witches and True as Steel. One listen to Raise Your Fist is all it takes to tell that her voice doesn’t pack the same punch it did three decades ago. She might not be twenty years old anymore, but I could’ve closed my eyes and pretended if she could still let it rip like she did on True as Steel. There are times when she comes close, though. Most of the songs on Raise Your Fist are pretty rocking. As far as her solo output goes, this is the best Doro album in ages - maybe ever. Songs like “Raise Your Fist,” “Rock Till Death” and “Revenge” are easily the best she’s done in her entire solo career. Where this album fails is in the ballads. The worst one has to be “It Still Hurts,” a duet with Lemmy. How do you fuck up a duet with the voice of Motorhead? You have Mister “I’m So Bad Baby I Don’t Care” sing a ballad that amounts to, “I’m sorry I hurt you, baby, please don’t hate me forever.” That’s a sin against five or six different kinds of extreme music. If you want sappy shit like that on your album, get that fag from H.I.M. to sing it. Lemmy is one of the few remaining Metal Gods on Earth. You don’t relegate someone like that to second string on a sappy love song. If I wanted to hear sappy love songs, I’d listen to Taylor Swift. I could’ve handled a song like “It Still Hurts” if it had been indignant (“I’m going to saw your dick off, you cheating asshole!”) or had lyrics about her mailing him dead animals. Instead, it just droned on and on and on for what seemed like forever, never building but lingering in the air like a really bad fart. On the whole, the ballads make up only a thankfully small portion of this album. The rest of this is a solid slab of Traditional Metal that longtime fans of Warlock will surely enjoy.
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