Customer Reviews

Iron Savior

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This is Iron Savior's debut album. It was announced as a superband, including Thomen Stauch of Blind Guardian in the drums, Gamma Ray's and former Helloween Kai Hansen on guitars and the mastermind behind the Savior, Piet Sielck on vocals, bass, keyboards and guitars. Piet is best known for his job as a producer of German bands and his guest appearances in different bands.

The name IRON SAVIOR comes from a science fiction story invented by Piet, in which the Iron Savior is a huge vessel built and then sent out to space by the hostile civilization of Atlantis 350.000 years ago, in order to protect them from the Alliance's attack. And the story goes on, and the lyrics are based on the story's events with liner notes on each song.

Musically, IS is 100% german power metal. Piet and co. manage to deliver a good album, within (and besides) the genre's limitations. You'll find here classics such as "Atlantis falling", "Riding on fire", "Watcher in the sky", "For the world", "brave new world" and "Iron Savior". Except for a few contributions from Kai Hansen, the majority of the music is written by Piet himself. It's nothing out of this world, nothing new, but not mediocre and totally worth listening.

Screaming guitars, pounding drumming with classic solos and choruses, with different tempos, like the ultra-fast "Brave new world" and the brutal "Riding on fire", the intrincate rhythm in "For the world" (sang by Blind Guardian's Hansi Kursch) or the ballad "Break it up". If you want to get acquainted with Iron Savior's funny rockin' side you have the Nazareth cover "This flight tonight".

If I have to compare I'd probably mention the old Rage, Grave Digger's trilogy, and Hammerfall are closer to Iron Savior in power, brutality, speed and guitar riffing.

If you're into power metal and like the bands above mentioned you will appreciate this album.

Ok, after listening to the debut album from GammaFall, I mean, HelloRay, er, that is Hammer Guardian, no, Blind Ween. Oh, I have no idea who this is! I'm now convinced that there are 11 power metal musicians in ALL OF EUROPE and they're in one big band with rotating memberships of anywhere from 3-5 members using 8-10 different names. Sometimes the chosen members produce SICK albums (a la Blind Guardian, Gamma Ray), and sometimes they sound just like well, everybody else (i.e. this album).

All kidding aside, I was really having a difficult time concentrating while listening to this record. It sounded just like many other power metal bands out there. Only this bunch of guys sings about a big metal thingie and the lost continent of Atlantis, or some such silliness. I was hard pressed to pick a single song that really stood out for me, though "For the World" (featuring Hansi of Blind Guardian on guest vocals) was the best of a mostly forgettable bunch. And strangely, there's a subtle-as-a-sledgehammer tribute to a friend of Piet's who's apparently struggling with heroin addiction. Not coincidentally, this is by far the worst song on the album. Not counting the awful Nazareth cover that closes the album.

On the whole, it's a good album. It's just that Kai Hansen's own band, Gamma Ray, does this SO MUCH BETTER. So this is average power metal at best. Get it if you haven't heard much else, otherwise, stick to the proven kings like Helloween, Hammerfall, Gamma Ray, Blind Guardian, Angra, and some others.

Iron Savior has done it again. Combining pure metal with meldoic lyrics, great guitar and drums they've created a master work of music- of art. In the form of older groups (such as Blind Guaridan) they've created not just a CD, but a musical epic. Their CD's arn't just music, they tell a tale. Like a good book the story has complex twists and turns, but is understandable, for those whom pay attention. If you like Blind Guardian, you will like Iron Savior.

It's without doubt a good work. This debut-cd is made by true musicians such as the great Kai Hansen, the power-drummer Thomen from Blind Guardian, the excellent Grave Digger's Piet Sielck, but, if you listen to it again and again you understand the total lack of originality. There are beautiful songs like "Atlantis Falling", "Brave New World", "Iron Savior" and the immortal "Watcher in the Sky", included in the cult-cd by Gamma Ray "Somewhere out in Space", but during the listening session you get a deja-vu feeling which spoils everything...in substance this is not a must-have, it's something that you can buy if you want to increase your collection, if power metal is your life, if you want a work made by three stars of metal...an advice? If you love power metal look at Gamma Ray, Helloween, (the Helloween of the Keepers, of course), Eldritch, Labyrinth, Stratovarius, Manowar if you are interested to something of very powerful, otherwise, if you want at any cost something of Iron Savior buy their new release, "Unification", whose cover of Black Sabbath "Neon Knights" is worth the price of the disc.

Hail Brothers of True Metal, keep the faith alive!!!

This is the album in which the Sci-fi, metal saga of the Iron Savior starts. Kai Hansen's influence and style are more than evident here. For me it's one of the best albums of the 90's. The concept of the story is really good and the song writing and the performance brilliant.I would really like to see this concept taken into a big budget movie, is fantastic. The following 3 albums continue and expand the story, but this is the first episode. Great music and a great idea. Recommended to all metalheads.

The first album from Iron Savior is a fantastic concept album that started a story that has run through a number of subsequent releases. It's a time-and-space-spanning science fiction epic, a field of storytelling that hasn't been used in metal concept albums nearly as much as horror or fantasy (which have resulted in outstanding releases like King Diamond's "Them" and Blind Guardian's "Nightfall In Middle-Earth") and it's proved a fertile ground for the band to return to again and again.

As well as the name of the band and the debut album, 'Iron Savior' is also the name of the saga's central entity - an ancient and gigantic living vessel built eons ago in Atlantis that destroyed human civilization once, and returns in the year 2108. In the lengthy backstory to the concept, millennia ago (I believe it was 350,000 years ago) the Earth was highly civilized; there was utopic Atlantis, and there was the rest of the world under the loose affiliation of 'the Alliance', which was a ruthless and militaristic society. In the inevitable war that eventually erupted between Atlantis and the Alliance, the Iron Savior was built as the ultimate defender. Agents of the Alliance somehow infiltrated the programming between the biological and mechanical components of the Savior and corrupted it, basically driving it insane. The Savior annihilated both the Alliance and Atlantis and set off blindly into space (while the remnants of humanity eventually build up from the ashes), eventually returning to a future world where the confused machine mistakes everything in sight for its Alliance enemies. The story flashes back and forward through time: the prelude piece 'The Arrival' represents the 2108 return, the first full song 'Atlantis Falling' is back at the time of global destruction, followed by 'Brave New World' and 'Iron Savior' - slightly before, concurrent with, and just after the opening piece. 'Riding On Fire' then flashes back to Atlantean times again. It probably sounds confusing but the strange thing is, it's not. It's crafted like a well-written novel and the non-linear storyline is actually a strength.

As with Blaze's "Silicon Messiah" album, many of the tracks here can be taken as stand-alone pieces as easily as they can as parts of the concept album. 'Brave New World' - which reveals the world of 2108 to be a highly controlled, overly streilized and increasingly emotionless place - can be taken just as well as a song about the current direction of certain world trends. (As anyone reading this probably knows, this kind of thing is a favorite topic of many power metal bands) Track 6, the slower, lighter 'Break It Up' has only a tenuous or allegorical connection to the main concept: it's basically about addiction (most easily read as drug addiction but that could be read as a lot of things) and people falling into it who never thought they would. The end track, a cover version of Nazareth's 'This Flight Tonight' is a total departure, having nothing to do with the concept portion's ender 'For The World' or the rest of the album. It shouldn't fit at all, but somehow it does. It's kind of like a band including a lone studio track at the end of a live album, which isn't a detriment.

For the music itself - the album is easily one of the best pure 'speed metal' albums ever recorded. I find usually, the albums of the best metal bands - Judas Priest, Within Temptation, Metallica, Iron Maiden, Nightwish, a bunch of others - are rather more broad than would easily fit in one of the numerous subgenres or sub-subgenres within metal (speed metal, thrash, melodic death metal, brutal death metal, symphonic neo-classical metal, symphonic power metal, etc. etc. They split the hair way too fine, and keeping right in the parameters of one of these little niches for every song on every album usually limits a band's potential. There are a few exceptions) Iron Savior is right in the speed metal vein precisely though - everything blazing at a thousand miles an hour most of the time except when the album drops down for the obligatory slower and/or acoustic digression (here 'Break It Up' fills that slot); soaring, usually pitched in the high-to-ultrasonic range, vocals; drummer firing away like he's got steam pistons in his shoulders... On this album, all the elements work, and are anything but limiting. This kind of album had been done many, many times before and has been done countless times since, but the double-bass drumming (just raging, provided by Blind Guardian's Thomen Stauch) sound fresh, the countless high-speed guitar solos sound fresh, everything is vibrant; and it's still fresh and vibrant years later. Piet Sielck's vocals are a cut above most of the singers for bands similar to Savior. A lot of them are good, but there are fifty other vocalists out there who are almost identical. Sielck is more than just good, he doesn't really sound like anybody else, and he's got a good range (one that actually expands even more in later stuff). Kai Hansen of Gamma Ray and Helloween steps in for lead vocals on 'Watcher In The Sky' and provides one of his all-time best vocal performances. Blind Guardian's Hansi Kursch guests on a single track, contributing vocals to the monumental 'For The World'. He sang different for this one than on most Blind Guardian tracks because the music is quite different, and it's another roaring success for Kursch.

There are a lot of perfectly fine speed metal discs out there, but many of them are so close together it can be difficult figuring out which ones to get. This one fits the vein perfectly but still manages to carve a distinct spot for itself, and is just more powerful, more energizing, and better made in the songwriting and performance aspects, than most. A must for power metal fans and one that music fans from outside the genre might want to consider too.

Some people believe this is just a side project from Kai (Gamma Ray). But it's much more than that. As you can see, after this album, Iron Savior has released 5 full albums and 1 EP. However, I find this one the best.

Piet's vocals are great and very unique, and all tracks are amazing, due greatly to the musicians that form the bands' line-up. The album tells the story of Iron Savior and Atlantis (it's explained in detail on the offical site and commented in the beginning of each track's lyrcis), and it's sequential from the beginning until "For The World" that ends the story so far.

The covers can be considered "bonus tracks" as they don't realy match the album concept.

Overall, it's a great album with no "one songs is better than the other". All of them are great and catchy, and follow the storyline. I recommend it to all fans of Gamma Ray, Blind Guardian and this kind of music in general.

I'm a huge fan of Kai Hansen. I also like very much some recent works by German powermetal bands ( "EXCALIBUR" by Grave Digger and "NIGHTFALL ON MIDDLE EARTH" by BLind Guardian, for example ). But Kai Hansen appearance in IRON SAVIOR is almos as guest, since Pit Sielck writes all the songs, sings, plays guitar, bass and keyboards !!! The result is an album in which you clearly see the musicians skills, but where every song sounds the same: a furious metal assault with melodic choruses in between. After the first listening, the CD will be stuck into you collection pile for a long time ...

Wow,this is an excelent album that is reminiscent of the classical 80's heavy metal,with roaring guitar solos and impressive rythimcs,this one is fun to listen to and is entertaining also because the whole cd is conceptual going around a story about the ancient civilization of Atlantis. I really like this one,it always reminds me of that 80's "pure" metal,it has a similar style to Iron Maiden or judas priest (the guitars and rythm) you could say,this is a power ride almost entirely from beginning to end.

This album is what is missing as of late, that melodic, no frills metal of the 80's. Total power metal guitar edge, yet choruses that stick in your mind (For the World! ) This album came out 10 years too late, otherwise it would have been hailed as a mesterpiece. Melodic guitar work, with Piet Sielck's somewhat gruff(by powermetal standards) leading the way. Vocal melodies carry this one all the way. A definite buy for any powermetal fans!