Atlantis Rising

The best comparison I can muster for Atlantis Rising is that it’s like the Manilla Road version of Formulas Fatal to the Flesh. After a decently lengthy period of no new material, the band comes back in full force and releases a great but flawed album to dust themselves off and introduce a new style or formula, before perfecting it in the following album (Gateways/Spiral Castle). The difference here is that Atlantis Rising is actually the coherent album while Spiral is a total jumble of concepts, whereas Formulas is all over the place but Gateways is almost like a clear story in my head.

The 2000s Manilla Road albums, for the most part, follow a concept story quite clearly instead of just going off a theme like Open the Gates did with King Arthur. Atlantis, Gates of Fire and Voyager are all concept albums in some form. Spiral is the weird different middle child but we love it anyway. This one is probably the most metal thing you could ever come up with. The city of Atlantis rises from the sea, an ancient witch comes to usurp the king and summon Cthulu, Cthulu kills her and tears Midgard apart, prompting Wotan and the Einherjers of Valhalla to rise and take back the mortal realm. How badass is that? Genuinely one of the coolest concept stories I’ve ever seen in a metal album. So how does the music hold up?

Well, the album actually starts off with the song Megalodon which is a cool opener but also quite unfitting. It has nothing to do with anything, it’s just here because Mark and Brian Patrick (who is finally here in some form!) wanted to write a song about a big badass shark. Which is fair enough. Yet, I feel as though this would have suited a bonus track better and the opener could have instead followed the story that the album’s trying to tell. From this point on, the album is split into 4 separate sections or ‘books’.

The Rise (of Atland) is made up of Lemuria, basically just an interlude to build atmosphere which I don’t mind and then the title cut, Atlantis Rising, sporting a guest vocalist in Darby Pentecost. Darby Pentecost, anybody? He does a serviceable job here, I guess. The song is good but it drags on a lot and the sound effects at the end go on far too long, over a minute of just rain and sea noises! I get you’re trying to build an atmosphere here but that’s just far too long.

The Fall (of Atland) is where the album picks up the pace and the 3 best songs are all here. Sea Witch is an excellent and beautiful ballad, almost reminds me of my ex, though she wasn’t quite as cool as a witch reciting incantations to summon an Elder God to take the world over. Resurrection and Decimation are both exactly the same length and parallel eachother quite well. The intro goes on a while in Resurrection but it’s still quite an epic song. I see it as it representing the Sea Witch summoning Cthulu, and when it speeds up is when the God emerges. It’s truly incredible, and Decimation after it keeps the trend going. That song is absolutely crushing, this is really what 2000s Road is all about. Crushing riffs, almost death metal, but still very distinct.

Bifrost (The Rainbow Bridge) is where Big Daddy Woden gets involved and he is not happy. Flight of the Ravens is a nice little interlude - fun fact, Mark Anderson played the guitar on this song and named his son Raven after it. This leads into March of the Gods, my personal favourite song on the album. This one’s got everything - a cool bassline, crushing riffs and cool solos. That’s all you need to impress me, really. It doesn’t drag on, either, like this album tends to do.

The Battle (Of Midgard) is the final book. Siege of Atland is a totally serviceable song, keeps the story moving, very cool unique intro for Manilla Road but past that it’s nothing special. War of the Gods however… probably the worst song this band ever made if I’m being honest. And it’s still good! That really shows how perfect this band really is, when out of 170 or so songs, the worst one is still really good. It’s close between this one, Hallowed be thy Grave, and a couple of To Kill a King, but this one just takes it. It’s slow and boring, repeating the same riff more than any other song on this already sluggish and repetitive album. The vocal performance on this though is phenomenal, and the atmosphere is incredible. I’ve brought up atmosphere a lot on this review because it is integral to enjoying the album. If you can get lost in this album, then the repetitive riffs and long interludes won’t bother you nearly as much, but from casual listening it kinda sucks.

Anyway, Cthulu’s dead, Oden wins again, world is saved, yay! Manilla Road are back? Now we’re talking. This is one of their weakest albums, yet I still give it a score this high, this should just show you how much I love this band and how great I think all their material truly is. Onto better ventures and higher heights!!

Comeback albums are almost always disappointing; very few bands still retain today the fire they had in the mid '80s. Be it Helstar, Sacred Oath, or Cloven Hoof, it's just very unusual for a USPM band to reunite years later and release any quality material. However, given Manilla Road's absurdly good track record, I expected they would be the exception rather than the rule. Well, I was both right and wrong. While they have released some quality material since their reunion - quite a bit, in fact - their first comeback album, Atlantis Rising, fails to live up to the MR legacy in almost every way. Although far from terrible, it pales in comparison to the rest of Shelton's work.

The fact that the band is comprised of all new members (other than Shelton himself) does explain, in part, the lack of quality on the release. I'm not sure how long it took to write and record everything here, but from the sound of it Shelton was more or less testing the waters to see how the metal community would react to a new MR release; more than likely, he didn't put as much time or effort into it as he should have. I can't say I blame him, as the experiment proved more than successful - the world was definitely ready for the return of MR. Still, I can't help but feel that the band's true return would be delayed until the release of 2002's brilliant Spiral Castle, while AR was more like a band rehearsal than a true full-length effort.

While it is one of the band's most accessible releases, alongside Crystal Logic and Playground of the Damned, Atlantis Rising is fairly generic and uninspired. The riffs are bland and repetitive, the song structures are simple and mundane, and the vocals are far from Shelton's best - although I can't say they're altogether too bad. The production, too, is lacking - it's both murky and dry as hell, which both makes the music sound muffled and accentuates the riffs - which would be good, if the riffs were worthwhile. As it stands, the music just sounds like it was recorded in someone's basement and mixed by an 8-year-old. The songs are bland and often overlong, attempting to milk a riff that was never particularly good in the first place, or create an atmosphere that's castrated by the lack of ingenuity in the songwriting.

That being said, there are a couple of good songs here - "Sea Witch", for one. Along with "Lemuria" and "Flight of the Ravens", it stands as one of the album's ballads, and it's almost definitely the best song here. Though simple, the occult, nautical main riff evokes thoughts of The Courts of Chaos and Mystification - this is definitely not a song you want to skip, and it's a worthy addition to the MR repertoire. "Flight of the Ravens" isn't terrible, but it doesn't achieve much, and it's too short to really get going. "Lemuria" attempts to build a strong atmosphere, but the lack of riffs causes it to fall on its face.

The other songs are pretty similar to one another - mildly thrashy, banal numbers with some decent soloing. The standouts here are "Resurrection", which starts out poorly, but eventually gets going quite nicely, with a dark, doomy bite to it that reminds me of Shelton's recent side project, Hellwell. "March of the Gods" is pretty good, too - although also a bit overlong, when it gets going it's pretty cool stuff - mysterious and ominous. I feel like this song is what the album tried to achieve, but mostly failed to. If the whole album were of this quality, I definitely wouldn't have any qualms about it. The others are largely irredeemable, with, as I mentioned, some good soloing, but little else of note. Check this out only if you're a hardcore Manilla Road fan - otherwise, except for perhaps "March of the Gods" and "Sea Witch", it's not worth your time. Thankfully, this was a fluke for Shelton, and he's continued to produce quality album after quality album since its release.

Manilla Road is an enigma in the power metal world, mostly due to the fact that there weren’t any set rules on how to sound when the band started back in the late 70s. Much like their NWOBHM brethren across the Atlantic, the only thing that really ties them together with many of the acts of their day was that they were making music at the same time. You can get bits and pieces of early metal pioneers like Aria, Diamond Head, and some traces of pre-Bruce Dickinson Iron Maiden on some of their mid to late 80s work, but the massive infusion of progressive rock sensibilities found in the songwriting of their later albums makes for a less conventional mix than even what Maiden has been doing of late.

One thing that can be plainly said about this outfit is that the last thing on their mind is wide-reaching accessibility. They’re obsession with literature and ancient mythological tales combined with a complete rejection of the standards of song structure and recording methods of today make even the shortest of their songs unfit for radio play. As they have evolved, their approach to album construction has shifted from a compact 3-5 minute epic sounding collection format to a massive group of 10 minute plus works album structure that makes Iron Maiden’s “A Matter of Life and Death” look like fodder for pop fans.

“Atlantis Rising” is the first of the line of longer winded, progressive sounding albums that followed the band’s reformation in the late 90s, although it doesn’t reach quite as far in the song length department as later works would. Although people knock much of the music that popped up in the closing years of the previous millennium, you could say that this recent turn of events was what inspired Mark Shelton to reform the band, albeit with a completely different lineup and an even less traditional sound. Many of the songs make atmospheric references to styles and sounds that would befit power/prog outfits such as Pagan’s Mind and early 90s Dream Theater to complement what is otherwise a pretty simple, riff driven style.

The first thing that jumps out at the listener is that despite being out of the game for just under a decade, Manilla Road has not elected to update their production sound to fit the trends of the day. You could go back and listen to some of their early 90s material just before they dropped off the metal train and hear very little difference in the production. The guitars, in particular, are extremely high end sounding and rest on top of a rhythm section that is also relatively high end tone wise. I’ve taken a particular liking to Shelton’s lead guitar tone, which is extremely close to that crunchy yet mellow sound Tony Iommi exhibited during the first Dio era of Sabbath. His technical approach to soloing, however, is heavily reminiscent of Blackmore’s on “Rising” and “Long Live Rock and Roll”, making for a very unique blend of two older styles in a time where most are obsessed with either Malmsteen or Hammet.

If all of this fits into your idea of what the US brand of power metal ought to be, you can’t really go wrong with anything that’s on here. There is a fair share of epic riff monsters like “Resurrection” and the title track, which mostly stick to the older NWOBHM influences of the band and give the guitar dominance over the arrangement. Some of the speed metal found in the second half of the album is extremely aggressive, almost conjuring up images of Mercyful Fate and Venom, particularly the almost toneless vocal delivery on “Siege of Atland” and the brutal as hell principle riff which almost as rapid fire crazy as Metallica’s “Fight Fire with Fire”.

The whole album basically functions as a sort of story book with 4 distinct chapters and a rather evil as hell prologue that, while only loosely related to the album’s concept, definitely sets the mood for the rest of the album. One listen to the evil as hell sounding, early Black Sabbath inspired main riff over the back drop of oceanic sounds in “Megalodon” and you’ll never want to go sailing again for fear that this prehistoric colossus might rise from the sea and tear you and your boat apart. Likewise, imagery of a sunken and forgotten city is easily visualized while hearing the wave-like flow of bass notes to the quasi-narrative overture “Lemuria”.

Whatever premises you have about both older guard US power metal particularly and the entire genre in the general sense, “Atlantis Rising” basically blows them out of the water. The only thing that probably keeps this band from gaining a wider audience is that the vast majority of metal fans have become accustomed to the modern production sound that most of the other surviving old guard heavy, power and thrash metal outfits have adopted since the mid to late 1990s. A good litmus test would be to break out a copy of either Iron Maiden’s debut album, Black Sabbath’s “Mob Rules” or Judas Priest’s “Sad Wings of Destiny” and see if you would dismiss a band you’ve never heard before for a similar production quality. If not, and you have a taste for US power metal with extra epic goodness, give this album a try.