Unleash the Beast

Since the mid 80's, Saxon was struggling with poor record sales and concerts attendance, after the release of albums of questionable musical quality. The changes of sound and visual made the band more “glam” then their fans could take, and the band was finally dropped from EMI in 1988. After that, the band started gradually to change their sound back to traditional heavy metal, and delivered good releases with Solid Ball of Rock, Forever Free and Dogs of War.

When 1997 came, the band had already kicked-out long time guitarist Graham Oliver for trying to sell material from the band's 1980 performance at Monsters of Rock without the groups consent, and Doug Scarratt was brought in to fill the gap in 1995. Unleash The Beast is his first album with the band, and led to a 23-year union that lasts to this day.

Starting with an instrumental piece called Gothic Dreams, the album has 53 minutes of the best Saxon can offer their fans: it has great lyrical work, and the guitars sound heavy, modern and very melodic. The record even has an acoustic song, Absent Friends, something that is not very common on Saxon's records. Unleash The Beast sounds slower than classical Saxon sound, but that's the whole point of the album: it distances itself from what the band was doing in the 80's and gives new life into the group. The album brought the band to the metal spot light once again.

The lyrics have a great diversity of topics: the content includes the traditional speed/riding thematic that follow the band's career, with a mix of mysticism and fantasy themes, near-death experience, politics, religion, war, and other topics. It shows the band has learned from their various changes within the years, finally combining a broad variety of subjects with a new and solid heavy metal sound, even when they sound simple in songs like Unleash The Beast and The Preacher ("Fire and brimstone send you straight to hell","gather round beneath the mission bell", "holy fire, holy water").

Saxon's Unleash The Beast also has a quality that most modern metal albums lack: there are no fillers. You can actually listen to the whole album without saying “this song is here just to add time on the record”. Unleash The Beast is Saxon's best effort from the 90's and it deserves the credit of bringing back to the game a great band that was starting to get behind the shadows. And they got out of the dark like a raging beast, just like the one on the cover.