Rock the Rebel/Metal the Devil

This may well be how future historians will one day write about Volbeat’s stompin’ & rockin’ sound. Take some old-school (and that’s a compliment) Metallica/Megadeth riffs, throw in some very tight drumming indeed, and pour over liberal amounts of Poulsen’s vocal metal-jodel artistry - and voila!

This, their second album, is a bit more polished than the first. While die-hard fans of any band will often see this as “selling out”, I think that in this case it is more a question of Volbeat being a band that is so playful & experimental, eager to try whatever they think will sound good — that it simply will not work to put them in a narrowly defined box.

Take some of the songs on this album:
Much has been written about ‘Sad Man’s Tongue’ already, but that doesn’t change the fact that if you don’t start (at the very least)stomping you foot when you hear it, you seriously need to have your ears examined. The shift in energy is one of the best I have every heard in any song.

The much slower, but comparatively fantastic build-up in speed and intensity in ‘The human instrument’ is one of the best openers on any of the albums I own, for sure.

“The Garden’s Tale” even features some Danish (!) singing, by guest-singer Johan Olsen, leadsinger in the Danish band ‘Magtens Korridorer’ (yeaah! -go, biologists!). Two hard-singing men in a duet, go figure. It works. And then some. And again, the shifts in speed throughout - yumyum!

However, they also do full frontal assaults, head-on, like in the songs “You or them” or “River Queen”. I must saym though, that they did this even better on the first album “The strenth/The sound/The songs” - especially on the track “Rebel Monster” (oh, and do check out the cover of Springfield’s old ‘I only wanna be with you’ from that album - priceless!).

As a Danish expat stuck in the US, I have so far been unable to attend a live act with these guys — but plenty of reports from friends in Denmark & Germany leave no doubt: they are a formidable liveband, and thus how one should really experience their music. One day… …come over here, guys!!
Only small piece of advice: they should tighten/improve the lyrics a bit; get someone who’s good at English to help polish the language. But this is a very minor blurp.

Lastly, even if it should transpire that these guys for whatever unfair reason should remain unknown to most people, it doesn’t change the fact that Volbeat ROCKS!