Primal Fear - Delivering the Black
Some people lump Primal Fear in with the Power Metal bands and that’s really a mischaracterization of their music. While the band shares many qualities with Power Metal, Gamma Ray in particular, they’re really more of a Traditional Metal band. If you really get down to it, their claim to fame is being a German version of Judas Priest. Naturally, they’re not as good as old Judas Priest, but then again, few bands ever achieve that level of success and recognition based solely on their musical abilities. Judas Priest was one of those groups that got huge because they created some of the best pure Metal ever recorded. A band like Primal Fear is going to have a tough time even coming close to the edge of the monstrous shadow that Rob Halford and company cast over the Metal world. Even though they’ve augmented their sound with copious amounts of old Accept and post-Uli Roth Scorpions, they still have that glaringly obvious Priest influence. The thing that’s most striking about Primal Fear isn’t that they’re still trying to be Judas Priest (they are), but that they’re only taking the most recognizable aspects of the Priest sound and leaving out the things that made JP original. They don’t do any experimentation with weird harmonics or different styles. Their sound isn’t versatile enough to go there, it seems. Their music is rock-solid Heavy Fucking Metal, but Primal Fear hasn’t figured out a way to distance themselves from obvious clone status. To make matters worse, they haven’t really evolved much. They still pretty much sound the same as they did back in the ’90s. They’ve refined things a bit, but ultimately it’s still the same old shit all over again. Delivering the Black isn’t a bad album, but if you already own a couple of Primal Fear’s LPs, you’re really not getting anything you haven’t heard before. Maybe the guys in Primal Fear need to stop listening to Judas Priest and start listening to the bands that influenced them. They know what Priest sounds like but they don’t know what made Priest great. The range of music that Priest employed spanned from ’70s Hard Rock to Speed Metal to Thrash and everywhere in between. They could take all of that and craft songs and records that were uniquely their own. I’d like to see Primal Fear be likewise more adventurous. Cloning Judas Priest is fine if you’re in a tribute band, but after more than fifteen years and ten full-length albums, you’d think that Primal Fear would have more up their collective sleeves than rearranging riffs from Defenders of the Faith. Delivering the Black is still a solid LP of Heavy Metal music, though. It has good riffs and melodies, but ultimately all you ever do is compare it to any Judas Priest LP from Stained Class to Nostradamus. In the end, I always end up asking myself, “Is it worth it to listen to Primal Fear when I already own the Judas Priest discography?” If you’re wondering what my answer to that question is, I’m listening to Screaming for Vengeance right now.
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