When snide ironism takes over music, authentic spirit and power are forgotten and ignored. That is, if you read the music media and listen to the music hipsters. However, back in everyday life people love it because it does what music does best: affirm life and urge us on to greater heights. It inspires.

Manowar joins superbands like Metallica and Iron Maiden in pleasing crowds with a kinder, gentler and non-dark version of heavy metal. The perfectly adjusted mix of power metal, speed metal, glam metal, hard rock and classic heavy metal, the music of Manowar is focused on the vocals and on chanted cadences that build up to foot-stomping, fist-swinging, chanting explosions of emotion.

It’s not unlike a church service or political rally. These songs usually start out slow with melody, and then build up the pace at which muted E chords shoot past. Over that, vocalist Eric Adams chants and sings, weaving melody in with a compelling rhythm to outline the rhythmic hook of the chorus. Suddenly it bursts out fully formed, a virus ready to take over your brain. You join the collective motion.

And yet with Manowar, there’s an honesty other styles of music don’t have. It isn’t about projecting yourself into the love story of two idealized people, which like porn makes you feel like you’re living out someone else’s life. This is fantasy on a grand scale, with wars and wizards and lone gunslingers, into which you want to join. But it isn’t about you. It’s about the thing you’d join.

This at least is what I hear seizing these crowds and propelling them to ecstatic emotion. Recorded throughout Europe and Eastern Europe, The Lord of Steel Live revisits classic Manowar hymns mostly from The Lord of Steel with a couple from other works and slows them down, focuses on the vocals, and creates a gospel of metal.

The slick blackened underground crowd will disagree of course. This isn’t metal like Necrocorpsemolestor, which is made in a band down by the river and accessible to only 500 die-hard fanatics worldwide. This is metal like Ozzy charming 100,000 people at a live festival, or Iron Maiden taking over Donnington, or even Metallica drawing out three generations of people in the tens of thousands. It’s music for the masses to discover music again.

The Lord of Steel Live is an EP with only six tracks. These are fairly lengthy, which puts this at a long EP or a short album, and creates the perfect escapism to drop out of life for twenty-seven minutes and indulge in some fantasy. Suddenly the living room has evaporated, and you’re shirtless and wearing viking armor as you assault the non-believers. You fight, you bleed, you struggle, you win, and then you come back to life to be another kind of hero. Perhaps the kind that fixes the leaky faucet, heals a kid’s wound and reconfigures the Wi-Fi.

While Manowar have not gotten enough attention from the media in the last few rounds, it’s clear their presence inspires many and those fans show no sign of waning. In fact, as underground metal has been swallowed up by hardcore and the true metal fanatics have shifted to power metal, the audience for metal has come closer to Manowar than any time in the past twenty years. It’s good to see this celebration of their work ready to inspire a new generation.

We come from different countries
With metal and with might
We drink a lot of beers
And play our metal loud at night
Fly the flag of metal
Brothers all the same
Born to live for metal
It ain’t no game

Tags: manowar, power metal