Grave Digger - The Grave Digger (2001) - A great overall impression - 86% (15/07/11)

After three good conceptual albums about medieval legacies, Grave Digger broke free from their boundaries with a new line-up and concept. On this eponymous record, the band starts in a fresh and new way into a new millennium and created a loosely bound conceptual album about horror topics that are mostly influenced by the novels of the legendary American writer Edgar Allan Poe. The new album sounds fresh and is a welcome and needed change of style just in the right moment.

Now to adequately represent this kind of topic in an appropriate musical way would need much more than just generic heavy or speed metal music but rather request a bleaker atmosphere. I am aware that the best bands for that kind of topic would be "The Vision Bleak" and similar artists but Grave Digger already proved us in the last years that they are open to vary and also able to create profound and mysterious moments within their discography as heard on "Heart of darkness". They ultimately also succeed to create such an atmosphere on this album without forgetting about their heavier roots. The opener "Son of evil" with its haunting and eerie piano melodies is already a great beginning and blows the doubts away. The risen expectations are fulfilled with further tracks like the dark and heavy "Raven", the creepy "Scythe of time" with its great bass lines and diversified vocal performances, the slow and epic "The house" and the great haunting ballad "Silence" that closes this album in an epic and surprising way. I would have hoped for even more epic and atmospheric songs of that kind but the band is not as consequent and courageous as I hoped.

A part of that, the band varies as usual from mid tempo hymns such as "Funeral procession" to fast paced tracks like "Spirits of the dead" that can be found on any of the band's records and would be great live tracks as well. Those songs work very well and won't disappoint any fan of the band but there are maybe two or three songs on the record that didn't need to be included on here and stretch the whole thing a little bit too much at some points. "King Pest" is the kind of song that we all heard multiple times from Grave Digger and didn't need to hear it once more in here. But after all, the band has done worse on other records.

Nevertheless, the end result still seems to be a very good mixture of the band's strengths and old school roots and the epic and bleak transformations they employed for this record. The darker tone of this album makes this mixture sound very coherent. The final result convinces as a whole structure and not only as a bunch of single entities. The songs itself are even less memorable and impressing as in the past or the future but the conceptual line and overall impression is particularly outstanding on this well received eponymous record that merits its courageous title. The album is particular but unites yet everything "Grave Digger" stood and still stand for. That's where this offering merits a very special place in the band's long discography and can be listed as one of their highlights after all as this record will surely grow on you.