The woman who had been fronting German heavy metal since the early eighties signed to Nuclear Blast, spent more than half a year on her first record for them, called in Lemmy for a duet and Gus G. for a solo, and released Raise Your Fist on 19 October 2012, almost four years after Fear No Evil, with a title that reads like a stage instruction and a voice that sounds, if anything, harder than it did when she started. Nobody asked her to prove anything. She proved it anyway.
The production trio, Doro Pesch herself with Andreas Bruhn and Torsten Sickert, built the record across more than half a year, with Jacob Hansen mixing several of the tracks in Denmark and Lemmy cutting his part of the duet in Los Angeles, a cast list long enough to bury a weaker singer under her own guests. Bas Maas and Luca Princiotta played guitar, Princiotta keyboards as well, Nick Douglas bass and Johnny Dee drums. The album runs to thirteen songs, two of them in German.
I wanted to make sure that the sound is hard, powerful and really, really good.
Doro Pesch, Femme Metal Webzine, October 2012
Be plain about what this is, because Doro records do not pretend to be anything else. It is classic Doro: anthems with fists in them, ballads with lighters in them, and a running order that alternates between the two like a setlist built for a festival field. If that formula has never moved you, this will not change your mind. If it has, this is one of the strongest versions of it she has made since the eighties.
The voice is the story. Thirty years in, she sings with more urgency than on many of her early records, and the big choruses hit the barrier like a battering ram swung at a castle gate, not a slogan read off a card. "Raise Your Fist in the Air", the opener and the lead track of an EP released in August 2012, does exactly what its title promises and not one thing more, which is the point of it. You will hear it at a festival and you will raise your fist; that is the contract.
"Revenge" is the one to play to a doubter: a thrash riff that strips the polish off the running order around it like a sander taken to a lacquered door, and among the finest songs she has written in any decade. "Take No Prisoner" leans the same way and earns its place. "Hero", the first song written for the album and a tribute to Ronnie James Dio, is the emotional anchor, and it carries the weight of the man it is about better than most tributes manage.
There is a trap waiting for every singer of her generation, the temptation to spend the late career re-recording the early one, and plenty of her peers have fallen straight into it. This record steps around it. The songs are new, written for this band, and they sound like someone with a current reason to be on stage rather than a catalogue to protect.
Nobody asked her for more. The voice gives it anyway.
"It Still Hurts" is the duet with Lemmy, and it divides people. Some hear a meeting of two old campaigners; others hear a guest who sounds more tender than he usually allowed himself to. That tenderness is either its charm or its oddity depending on how you take your Lemmy, and it is the charm. "Free My Heart" goes the other way: it is pleasant, it is competent, and it is forgotten by the next song.
That is the real limit. Thirteen songs is three too many. Somewhere in the second half the anthems start to sound like each other, the ballads queue up politely, and an album that should have hit like a forty minute set turns into a long evening. The production is clean and modern enough to keep the guitars upfront, though in places the choruses pile onto the guitars until the rhythm parts are crushed flat under them. Cut it to ten and you would have one of the best heavy metal records of its year.
German speakers get "Engel" and "Freiheit (Human Rights)", both worth the detour, and "Grab the Bull (Last Man Standing)" gets Gus G.'s solo and Alex Krull's voice for good measure. None of it is subtle. All of it is sincere.
The people who grew up on her will not need telling. The ones worth telling are those who assume the singers of the eighties have nothing left, because this record knocks that assumption off the stage and stamps on it. Put "Revenge" on first, then "Hero", and leave the rest of the evening to the front row.