Twenty-nine years separate Symbol of Salvation from Punching the Sky, and the same five men play on both. Between the two records lie a split, the singer's long tour of duty fronting Anthrax, a 1999 reunion and three more studio albums, and still the Los Angeles veterans of Armored Saint marched into their eighth full-length, released by Metal Blade on 23 October 2020, with John Bush on vocals, Phil Sandoval and Jeff Duncan on guitars, Joey Vera on bass and Gonzo Sandoval on drums. The garrison of 1991, mustered again. That is not nostalgia. It is a standing army.
Five years after Win Hands Down, Vera took the producer's chair again, recalled the engineering crew from that record and had the new one built room by room, drums tracked by Josh Newell at El Dorado in Burbank, guitars by Bill Metoyer at Skullseven in North Hollywood, vocals and bass at his own studio, the whole thing mixed by Jay Ruston. Dizzy Reed of Guns N' Roses came in on keyboards. Gonzo, for the first time in the band's history, picked up an American Indian flute. "It was all done pre-pandemic," Bush told Echoes & Dust on 18 December 2020. Few bands have timed a finishing line better.
Then the record opens, and it opens on a lament. A lone set of pipes sounds across empty ground, a single piper walking ahead of an armoured column, and the moment his last note thins out the column rolls over his footprints and crushes them into the dirt: the riff of "Standing on the Shoulders of Giants" lands at full tonnage, the guitars of Sandoval and Duncan grind forward abreast like the lead vehicles of the convoy, and a chorus built for an arena follows in its tracks. Nobody stops to mourn. At 6:46 it is the longest song here, and its title borrows Isaac Newton's most famous line about owing everything to those who came before, a fitting motto for a band now old enough to be somebody else's giant. Putting nearly seven minutes first is a gamble. It pays.
The heavy lifting comes further down the order. "End of the Attention Span", the first single in August 2020, arrives on an aggressive riff and a scattershot drum pattern, a song about the glowing screen in every hand that leaves no space to look at one. "Do Wrong to None", its title taken from a line of Shakespeare, grinds at mid-tempo with a crunch that recalls the heavier end of Bush's Anthrax years. And then "Missile to Gun", the fastest and most violent song on the album, tears through the middle of the record like a salvo fired from 1984, clipped riffing and a sprint of a chorus from a band that plainly kept the old speed oiled and ready. Metal Blade released its video on the day the album came out. Sound judgement.
Through all of it, the voice holds. Thirty-six years after March of the Saint, Bush still has the grit and the power that carried that debut, and "Fly in the Ointment" is where he proves it beyond dispute, quiet verses held close and almost conversational, then a chorus flung open at full force, the finest vocal on the record and the clearest proof that a slow song in this band's hands is a loaded weapon kept in a drawer. "Unfair" is the other quiet one, "a slower song, but very, very moody," as Bush put it on The Blairing Out With Eric Blair Show, transcribed by Blabbermouth on 29 February 2020. Underneath both, Vera and Gonzo keep the rhythm section as tight as a riveted hull.
That is not nostalgia. It is a standing army.
What holds the album back is the same thing that makes it trustworthy. This is a band refining its formula, never tearing it up, and fifty-three minutes is a long march for a record that carries no surprises in its pack. "Bark, No Bite" has charming Thin Lizzy twin leads and a wink in the lyric, and it is still the song the running order could most easily spare. "Never You Fret", the closer, carries Gonzo's flute and a pledge of loyalty rather than a fireworks finale, which suits these men and slightly undersells the record that came before it. A tighter forty-five minutes would have been ruthless. This is merely excellent.
After a decade in which so many veteran bands toured their own past, the question was whether any of them still had a real record left in them. Punching the Sky answers it. It is the rarest sight in heavy metal's long afternoon: five veterans playing as if the reputation were still to be won, a piper out in front and the armoured column grinding the hill flat behind him.