Ten records come up whenever the 80s power metal albums are argued over, and the number that would pass an audition for the genre as now described is one. The rest fail, each in a different place. The quartet from Hamburg whose first full album, cut in Berlin in the autumn of 1985, put a guitarist in front of the microphone was Helloween, and there is no clean tenor anywhere on Walls of Jericho. The Los Angeles four whose singer seldom climbed above his own guitars were Omen. The Kansas trio who dropped the voice down inside the riff and left it there for a decade were Manilla Road.
Until the middle of the nineteen fifties a gramophone record did not hold the music. It held the music bent out of shape, the bass dragged down and the top hauled up by whatever amount the company that cut the disc had settled on for itself, so that the amplifier playing it carried a row of switches with trade names lettered beside them, because only the right switch bent the sound back into something a room could believe. Then one curve was agreed for everybody. The switches came off the chassis, the holes were blanked, and a great many discs cut before the agreement have played muffled and heavy on every machine built since, the top shaved off the voices and the floor swollen under them. Nothing was done to the discs.
Every requirement in the modern description was taken off a handful of these records after the fact and then consecrated: a clean tenor riding above the guitars, two kick drums running without a gap underneath, a major chorus wide enough for a field, keyboards in the frame. None of it was a requirement in 1984. The records were racked under speed metal, reviewed against whatever lay in the next sleeve, and every band settled the question with the throats and the money it had, so the fault a modern ear hears sits in the decoder.
The test the 80s power metal albums fail
One album of the decade meets every requirement, and it meets them because it wrote them. Issued in May 1987 with a teenager in front of the band, Keeper of the Seven Keys Part I settled the tenor, the tempo and the shape of the European chorus at a stroke, and everything after was measured against it. Which is why the album canon reads as a sequence of corrections rather than a shelf of degrees. A record that arrived before the correction cannot be marked down for failing to contain it.
A record that arrived before the correction cannot be marked down for failing to contain it.
So the decade will not rank by how much power metal each album holds. Ranked that way it comes out as a table of near misses and small heresies, the Americans at the bottom for owning no keyboards and the Germans in the middle for owning the wrong singer, which is a verdict on a yardstick. What the ten offer is ten private answers to one problem, and most of them cannot be held at once. A record with no keyboard on it and a record built round one are not two degrees of the same idea.
Which leaves one question worth putting to each record, and it is not how modern the thing sounds. Nobody here gave anything up, because there was nothing yet to give up. The question is whether what the record leaves out was a decision or a shortage.
What the American records leave out
Cut in 1986 between rooms in Memphis and Kansas and out in August 1987, Mystification is where the American answer hardens into a method: a gravelled guitar tone with all the dirt left in it, cymbals half swallowed in the mix, drumming erratic enough to keep tearing the bar open under the riff, and a nasal, warbling delivery from Mark Shelton sitting precisely where the European rule forbids a voice to sit. Judged against that rule it is a botched record. On its own terms it is a band that never considered hiring a tenor.
The title song starts as a ballad and then turns into something that batters the arrangement it had been sitting quietly inside. Nothing in 1987 forbade it. The modern rule does: a song is supposed to keep the pace it opened on, and here the pace is the first thing to go.
Produced by Brian Slagel at a Hollywood studio and out on Metal Blade in 1984, Battle Cry throws away more of the modern description than any other record of the decade and loses nothing by it: ten songs, not one past four and a half minutes, no quest at the end of side two, and no keyboard anywhere. Kimball at the microphone roars melodically rather than sings, in the middle of his range nearly from the first bar to the last, which is not a limitation but the design of a record built to be shouted back.
Two further American records make the point harder to miss. Out on Iron Works in August 1984, Ample Destruction does put a real tenor up over the guitars, then sets him in a thick, old-school mix that leaves him to take the lead; the Colorado band that did it was Jag Panzer. The band whose answer to the absent keyboard was a shriek pitched where no keyboard could have sat was Agent Steel, and Unstoppable Force, recorded across two spells of 1986 and out on Combat in March 1987, opens at a velocity that leaves the voice nowhere to go but up. Both were filed as speed metal. So was half the decade.
Germany had no tenor either
The German half of the decade is remembered as the half that solved the voice, and for one record that is true. Everything before it says otherwise, and the anathema the modern description reserves for a rasp would have cleared the German shelf of 1985 in an afternoon.
The band whose singer sang from the throat rather than the head was Grave Digger, and Witch Hunter, recorded in Berlin in the first weeks of 1985 and out on 10 May, is built round that rasp: a voice made of gravel sitting at the front of the mix and carrying every chorus. Four years later the same instinct produced the strongest German record of the decade's end.
Cut at a Hanover studio across July and August 1989 and out on 8 November with Rolf Kasparek and Karl-Ulrich Walterbach producing, Death or Glory is the decade's hardest argument for a chorus that belongs to nobody: the lead singing muscular and commanding, nearly every refrain handed to a crowd of voices, fifty minutes of it, and not a tenor within earshot. Running Wild had worked out that a line thousands can take off a band outlasts a line one man can hold.
Riding the Storm opens the album at six and a half minutes with two long instrumental stretches inside it, which in 1989 was not indulgence but a band trusting its guitars further than its singer, and the big picture has the German school reversing that instinct before the nineties were out. The relentless part is what got copied. The trust did not.
A decision sounds different from a shortage
Two composers writing for a band that may be a player short go about it in opposite ways, and the difference carries to the back of the hall. The first writes the horn line so the violas underneath already carry every note in it, writes ad libitum over it, take it or leave it, and the music stands up whole with nobody on the horn. The second writes a line nothing else doubles, and on the night the horn fails to arrive the loud passage tears a hole clean through the middle of its own chord, and the fourteen men who did turn up get blamed for an absence that was never theirs to cover.
That is the test, and it and most of the decade passes it. The American band that pushed the top line up into screams and kept the production sleek and clean beneath it was Crimson Glory, and Transcendence, out of a Tampa studio in November 1988, holds those two decisions against each other. Nobody afterwards reconciled them. Nobody has needed to.
Put out by Noise on 25 August 1989, Secrets in a Weird World opens on a classical fragment of fifty two seconds and shuts on a track of nine minutes and thirteen, which is the European apparatus arriving a year early, while the shriek at the front stays where it had always sat in Rage. On the modern description that is one requirement met and one ignored. On the record it is a band that knew which of the two it could afford to leave out.
None of these records was made to a definition. The eighties did not produce power metal albums. They produced the records the definition was later written out of, and anybody wanting to hear the genre work to one should start with the best power metal albums of the 90s, where half the records turn the definition down and the rest reach it in 1997. The decade before it was still arguing about what it ought to say.
