Grave Digger – The Clans Will Rise Again (2010)

Celebrating 30 years of the band’s existence, Grave Digger comes at us with one of their most impressive releases in their career. With “The Clans Will Rise Again”, the band goes somewhat back into their “Tunes of War” era and continues to sing about Scotland. Since the first song with the bagpipes, you get the feeling this album will be nothing short from epic.

Chris Boltendahl vocals are as characteristic as always and greatly keep the Grave Digger sound alive. As the only remaining original member, he brings to the table all the experience of kicking ass and taking names over the span of 30 years. The rest of the band does a great job in capturing the old-school vibe of the genre and keeping it fresh with interesting keyboard sections and brilliant guitar riffs/solos.

With the addition of Axel "Ironfinger" Ritt on guitars, the band has a nice injection of fresh riffs and killer solos (i.e. “Coming Home”, “Highland Farewell” and the rich-sounding “Valley of Tears”). Aside form the sporadic keyboards, the rest of the music is very well composed and structured to create epic Metal anthems that will have you headbanging and wearing your braveheart make up since track one of this killer album.

We greatly enjoy that the overall Scottish theme is not exploited to death by adding bagpipes up the ass in this release. The balancing between the traditional Power/Heavy Metal music with some ‘traditional’ elements and the interesting lyrics is very well done, allowing the listener to get the message and still enjoy catchy metal tunes.

As you all know, Chris’s raspy vocals are excellent in songs like “Execution” and the epic chorus sections of songs like “Spider” and “Coming Home” bring back memories of the older Grave Digger material. Other songs like “Valley of Tears” show some experimentation with slower tempos and somewhat jazzy elements. As you can see the band is full of surprises and it still remains highly efficient at their ‘original’ trade.

“The Clans Will Rise Again” is another killer release from Grave Digger that will be greatly appreciated by any fans of the band and the genre. It’s nice to see some of the older bands stepping up and releasing epic albums way past their ‘bed time’. Highly recommendable for anybody looking for an epic release from a legendary band, and it’s a bit tired of listening to Accept’s latest album for the few weeks non-stop.

Release: October 1st, 2010

Country: Germany