01. Achilles, Agony And Ecstasy In Eight Parts
1 – Hector Storms The Wall
2 – The Death Of Patroclus
3 – Funeral March
4 – Armor Of The Gods
5 – Hector’s Final Hour
6 – Death Hector’s Reward
7 – The Desecration Of Hector’s Body
8 – The Glory Of Achilles
02. Metal Warriors
03. Ride The Dragon
04. Spirit Horse Of The Cherokee
05. Burning
06. The Power Of Thy Sword
07. The Demon’s Whip
08. Master Of The Wind
Manowar‘s made of steel, not clay, but age has not looked kindly upon them or their defiance, and this is one album that I seem to like less every time I listen to it in full. The Triumph Of Steel is a triumph piecemeal: it’s a platform for some classics pockmarked by filler, muddied by lifeless production, practically dead on arrival thanks to its importunate herald.
Manowar could just never seem to get their sound right. The gang vocals on Kings Of Metal are diffused into impotence; the guitars of the Ross era are trebly puffs of noise out-chugged by the bass; the low end on The Lord Of Steel is the audio equivalent of hooking an IV drip into the exhaust pipe of a tractor-trailer. The Triumph Of Steel doesn’t necessarily suffer a worse fate than other albums, for the instrumentation is tighter and more consistent than on any previous release and the guitars have a little more of the body that they so often lacked, but something about this sound still lands wide of the mark. The earliest albums shook with loose timing, gutsy percussion, and a persistent buzz that maybe hurt their impact on occasion but generally communicated vitality, energy, the kind of unrestrained power that Manowar needs to project; this album is so starched and controlled that it sounds flat by comparison, static and constrained and missing that messy and voluminous feeling of a live band; Joey DeMaio’s bass is clipped and confined, not so much the Death Tone of yore.
The Triumph Of Steel also features the first altered lineup since Into Glory Ride almost a decade earlier, with guitarist David Shankle and drummer Kenny “Rhino” Edwards replacing Ross the Boss and Scott Columbus, respectively. Both are competent, but showy rather than tasteful: Shankle is first and foremost a shredder, making solos out of disordered noise produced at tremendous speed, and the same could be said for Rhino, who tends to push the pedals more than his predecessor. In some way, this new form of excess suits the band’s mentality, and I’ll always prefer Shankle to Karl Logan for at least two reasons, but a frequent absence of memorable instrumental parts hamstrings the already uneven songwriting; the chemistry of a decade’s successes is not so easily reproduced.
“Burning” and “The Demon’s Whip” are tedious and overdrawn, prone to brief flashes of passion that sputter out unsupported. “The Power Of Thy Sword” gets closer to the mark with some favorable hooks, and then draws itself into an unnecessary eight minutes to squander its inspiration. Some parts of the album are brilliant: “Spirit Horse Of The Cherokee” is a personal favorite, “Ride The Dragon” is one of Manowar‘s fastest and most violent tunes, and the closer, “Master Of The Wind”, is a rare conventional ballad that’s surprisingly successful for a band so predicated on volume. And of course “Metal Warriors” is one of the ultimate Manowar anthems: an ode to the Hall and everyone in it, basically a collection of boasts about how unlikely it is that they will ever acquiesce to foregoing even a single one of their many decibels. This is one of those self-referential battle hymns at which Manowar excel, a call-and-response between vocals and instruments that blooms into a bigger and bigger deal as it marches along; featuring one of Eric Adams’s most iconic vocal performances and Shankle’s best solo, “Metal Warriors” is a proud entry in the long line of power metal propaganda pieces designed to send wimps and posers fleeing before it. For me, this is where The Triumph Of Steel begins. It’s too bad that this isn’t actually the first song on the album.
I’d feel much more charitably toward the indulgences and pitfalls of The Triumph Of Steel were it not for “Achilles”. “Achilles” is Manowar‘s longest composition by a fair stretch, and it does not even slightly deserve its obscene distinction: it has a handful of ideas that are at best decent surrounded by minutes upon minutes of empty space, quite often just completely dead soloing. It is not really a 28-minute-long song; it’s just 28 minutes of audio, and sometimes barely that. Manowar could write some absolute stunners in the 7-to-9-minute range, but I just don’t think they were equipped to write substantially beyond that, and it shows – so much of the track is transparently playing for time. And this opens the album, this challenging monstrosity of filler. Even if this were the greatest epic any power metal band had ever written (and oh boy is it ever not), starting the album with it just kills the pacing dead right there on the doorstep. The song itself is already comical in how ambitious it is; putting it first does admittedly make it a little funnier, but it also just destroys any chance it had at surviving Skip City on any future spins. That is B-side behavior. Compare Blind Guardian‘s “And Then There Was Silence”, which covers the same war in half the time and with 20 times the melodies, emotions, and layers. Compare the stuff Virgin Steele was doing with basically the same sound. This is a joke.
I’ll wrap up with “Spirit Horse Of The Cherokee”, another tune with strange motivations. The band hunkers into some tense musical motifs associated with a genericized Native American musical tradition, with Eric Adams whooping up some war cries in between verses from the perspective of the beleaguered Cherokee, and it makes for some thunderous and heroic choruses as always, but while I can’t speak to the spiritual aspects much – I’m not even sure about the origins of this eponymous spirit horse – historically speaking, this is a jumbled mess. Wounded Knee was an 1890 massacre of several hundred Lakota, not Cherokee, by the US Army, a good 40-60 years after the forced Cherokee removals that came to be known as the Trail of Tears. There were some Cherokee practitioners of the Ghost Dance and it became an almost pan-tribal movement for a while, but it was much more widespread in the Northern Plains than in Oklahoma, where the Cherokee were resettled. Not a single one of the individuals mentioned by name was actually Cherokee: Red Cloud (Oglala Lakota), Black Hawk (Sauk), Sitting Bull (Hunkpapa Lakota), Crazy Horse (Oglala Lakota), Geronimo (Chiricahua Apache). Ultimately, it handles its subject matter with about as much tact and accuracy as any Manowar song based heavily in a particular culture, and I do have to express my befuddlement at the scattershot approach to naming stuff. Still, while it ain’t exactly “Indians” or “Run To The Hills”, it’s probably the only metal song that makes explicit reference to Red Cloud, and that’s pretty cool.
It’s hard to overlook how much “Achilles” hangs over this album (except when I’m actually listening to the album, because then I just skip it). The Triumph Of Steel would certainly be stronger without it. I’m not sure that this could have ever been one of the great Manowar albums, but it could have at least staved off their collapse a while longer had they made some different choices.
Rating breakdown
| Performance: | 8 |
| Songwriting: | 7 |
| Originality: | 6 |
| Production: | 5 |
 | Written on 28.02.2024 by I’m the reviewer, and that means my opinion is correct. |