Year: 2020
Total Time: 53:41
Label: Napalm Records
In a career spanning 40 years, the German giants GRAVE DIGGER are launching their 20th studio album, “Fields Of Blood”. Not only does the album’s release coincide with the band’s 40th anniversary, but the new album is also the latest installment in the 1996 Scottish Highlands trilogy puzzle, following 1996’s “Tunes Of War” and “The Clans Will Rise Again” of 2010.
With the band returning to a more flexible live-up of four members, “Fields Of Blood” presents some of the best rhythms the band has written in years. Chris Boltendahl does a great job as a singer, full of emotion and theatricality, guitarist Axel Ritt adds moments of melody and neoclassicism to the riffs, while Jens Becker’s bass and Marcus Kniep’s drums give to the songs a marching rhythm. An album full of genuine Heavy Metal, “Fields Of Blood” is written by Germans who sang for Scotland. And that’s all.
The new album begins with an instrumental track, “The Clansman’s Journey”, which takes you to Scotland almost immediately with the traditional bagpipes that begin our musical journey there. As the introduction continues, the most characteristic elements of GRAVE DIGGER enter the battle with the guitar and drums – which acquire a frantic rhythm in the next track “All For The Kingdom”. It is not only the inclusion of the bagpipe in the introduction that adds the Scottish element to the album, but of course the lyrics and its overall theme. The rest of the tracks are more or less what one would expect from the band – overwhelming riffs and loud rhythms, they compose a very strong album, perhaps the best of the last four released by this fan-favorite band.
“Fields Of Blood” is a pleasant surprise. Wonderful riffs, majestic moments, proportional to the name of GRAVE DIGGER, a nice flashback to the 90’s, are the ingredients that compose this new effort by those great musicians of the genre.
Rating: 7,5/10
Editor: Fanouris Exintavelonis
Related Link: GRAVE DIGGER – Official Page
