HammerFall’s “Chapter V: Unbent, Unbowed, Unbroken“ is an album with many ups and downs. While the middle part includes several forgettable songs, the album also includes some of the band’s greatest efforts, a few controversial tunes and a hidden pearl.

Let’s start with the most amazing efforts. The album kicks off with “Secrets” which is maybe the best HammerFall opener ever. Right from the start, the band builds up an epic and majestic atmosphere before a ferocious up-tempo anthem kicks off with gripping guitar and keyboard melodies, a ferocious rhythm section and powerful vocals. The chorus is not only very catchy and features great melodies but is also quite meaningful. The highlight of this perfect track is the instrumental middle part featuring three extremely well executed guitar solos where Stefan Elmgren and Oscar Dronjak show off their hidden talent and prove that they can be on par with the greatest heavy metal guitarists of all times. I’m seriously asking myself why these obviously brilliant musicians seem to restrain themselves most of the times by playing rather tame, repetitive and ordinary solos in most of their songs. Now, this is an amazing way to start a record but it also sets the bar pretty high for the rest to come. The single “Blood Bound” fulfils the elevated expectations. It has no impressive solo passages but the track has other strengths. The song is to the point and doesn’t include one unnecessary second. It’s a powerful anthem with gripping vocals and harmonious guitar melodies leading to one of the strongest choruses in the band’s career which makes this track the best single the band has released in its career. This unbeatable opening duo seems to announce the band’s very best record but the following songs can’t keep the high quality and are only good average mid-tempo tracks somewhere between traditional heavy and power metal.

A promising exception may be the ballad “Never, Ever”. Some people may find the controversial track too cheesy, too soft and too weepy and when I’m listening to the strained vocals, the kitschy acoustic guitar and keyboard melodies and the melancholic guitar melodies in the chorus and bridge as well as the heavily emotionally charged vocals I can understand that point of view. On the other side, this song is truly moving me as I can somewhat relate to the lyrics about a sad end to a love relationship and I’m sure that I’m not the only one. That’s why the concept works perfectly for me and I really prefer this track over similar efforts in the past. Another controversial tracks that works at least partially for me is the album closer “Knights of the 21st Century” which clocks in at almost twelve and a half minutes as the longest HammerFall song ever. The truth is that the actual song already ends after about ten minutes and that the rest consist of two minutes of silence and a short humorous hidden part. This song combines Joacim Cans’ melodic vocals with Cronos’ guttural black metal growls of Venom fame. His exaggerated and theatrical performance sounds mildly amusing but I get the impression that this was the desired effect. Maybe the band wanted to build a diverting and slightly humorous contrast instead of truly adding an evil atmosphere to the tune. To my positive surprise, the two quite different vocalists complement each other and the entertaining vocal performances carry a track that is otherwise a little bit overlong and unspectacular from an instrumental point of view. In the end, this quite unusual song is a welcome change of style even though it’s only an average tune after all.

The hidden pearl of this album which includes a few too many fillers is “The Templar Flame”, a short yet epic heavy metal anthem almost on par with “Blood Bound”. The song is a little bit slower and the chorus is a little bit less euphoric which might be the reasons why this track is often overlooked. Still, the guitar melodies and vocals remind me of a mixture of HammerFall’s later single “Any Means Necessary” and Mike Oldfield’s “Moonlight Shadows” with a healthy dose of heavy metal of the eighties in the key of Iron Maiden with a fun sing-along part in the middle section. I really hope this song is on the set list when I’m going to see HammerFall live because this kind of tune is meant to be played in concert. I can only warmly recommend to rediscover this hidden gem again as it’s one of HammerFall’s catchiest and most entertaining tracks on here.

As you can see, this record is somehow a double-edged sword. It includes two undeniable band classics with the ferocious opener “Secrets” and the catchy single “Blood Bound”, an amazing heavy metal song meant to be played live with “The Templar Flame” as well as one of the band’s very best ballads with “Never, Ever” and one of their most experimental tracks with the unstable epic “Knights of the 21st Century”. These five tunes would have made an excellent EP. Sadly, the rest of this full length release is really unspectacular and sounds like random background music that can be skipped without any regrets. If a company ever decided to choose some metal tunes as elevator music, then they could find five candidates right here. My final verdict is that faithful fans of the band should purchase this release while occasional listeners may find the very best songs on here on the “Steel Meets Steel – Ten Years of Glory” compilation or the live outputs “Rebels with a Cause – Unruly, Unrestrained, Uninhibited” and “Gates of Dalhalla”.

No, this release isn't as innovative as many experts and fans claim. The stupidly entitled "Yeah! Yeah! Die! Die! Death Metal Symphony in Deep C" with an abysmal cover that makes Iron Maiden's Ed Hunter artwork look like a brilliant piece of art is a mediocre collection of opposing genres squeezed into one single record. The different genres are rarely fusioned and mostly stand apart. When they get mixed once in a while, they rarely harmonize. Waltari didn't really try out anything completely new either as bands such as Phlebotomized and Therion were also already mixing classical music and extreme metal elements back in the days in a much better way.

The overlong opener "Misty Dreariness" doesn't feature any rock or metal elements and is basically an elegiac piece of classical music plodding on for almost eight abominable minutes. As if that wasn't enough, the middle part of this album features a slow paced classical music instrumental entitled "Completely Alone" that even breaks the twelve minute mark. It's not because a track is long that it means it's experimental, intellectual or progressive. Now, don't get me wrong, I admire classical music and listen to everything from Bach and Beethoven over Wagner and Tchaikovsky to Orff and Varèse. There is great and inspired classical music and there is pseudo-intellectually plodding classical music. This here is definitely the second category. It gets much worse though as "Move" is a horrible mixture of female operatic vocals and male rap passages while the instruments play a really odd mixture of highly repetitive classical music with some scratching. A wannabe Montserrat Caballé meets a wannabe Chuck D in a nu metal prototype that makes even the worst Limp Bizkit song sound clever. The suffering doesn't end here for the listeners as the band closes the regular version of this release with "The Top". That is rather the bottom of this record. We get to hear uninspired classical music featuring technoid elements that actually sound like a mixture of cringeworthy Eurodance elements and dumb Darkwave sounds somewhere between DJ Bobo and Das Ich. Those who are complaining about Morbid Angel's Illud Divinum Insanus should actually listen to this track and will realize that the experimental fusion of metal and Darkwave can sound much worse than they might have thought before.

Where is the metal music in here? About one third or a little bit less of this release is actually death metal music. It sounds like a badly recorded mixture of early Atrocity and early Therion. Most of these parts are just brutal and fast but there are also a few slower and almost doom metal inspired parts. The latter parts sometimes harmonize with the classical music while the faster passages contrast this kind of music. Contrasting elements can work well if they are employed in a clever manner but Waltari keeps repeating the same song writing ideas all the time and after one or two initial surprises, the clash of genres just sounds odd and predictable. 

Now, why doesn't that release get an ever lower rating? A few songs actually manage to mix death metal elements and classical music in an interesting way like the well elaborated "A Sign", the chaotically experimental yet strangely coherent and fascinating "Deeper Into the Mud" and the mostly pitiless and fast paced short neck-breaker "The Struggle for Life and Death of Knowledge". These three songs stand out among the five abysmal potpourris and the pointless hidden bonus track. I must also admit that I'm impressed that Waltari and their partners in crime really had the courage to release this oddball of an album to the masses. 

In the end, this release is only interesting for those who are looking for an unusual listening experience that is experimental at all costs. If you actually want to listen to an elegant, energizing and progressive fusion of classical music and metal music, you should obviously choose Therion's records over this oddity.

Whoracle is probably In Flames' weakest studio release. It doesn't have the bleak atmosphere of the first releases, fails to come around with the catchy melodies and vocal lines of the transitory middle years and doesn't feature the more experimental alternative rock touch of the contemporary releases. This album feels like a rehash of the previous output The Jester Race which had a couple of decent tunes but wasn't the band's greatest hour either. A look at the track list already reveals the lack of inspiration on this album. The record is only forty-two minutes short and includes two fluffy and inoffensive filler instrumentals plus a cover track by Depeche Mode which means that there are only thirty-three minutes of own music with vocals left. It's funny enough that "Everything Counts" is one of the more energizing and catchier tunes and a rather interesting choice for a cover song. I have always appreciated In Flames' cover tracks and this is no exception. The experimental yet inoffensive original doesn't impress me much but this version is catchy, heavy and melodic at the same time. From the band's own material, only "Episode 666" reaches the same level of addictive energy and would have been an obvious single choice for such a band.

The only other standout songs are the more experimental efforts. "Jester Script Transfigured" is sometimes missing a clear guiding line but includes a couple of promising song writing ideas in a running time of almost six minutes. The acoustic guitar parts are moving and the distorted violon sounds add an elegant, elegiac and melancholic touch to a track that never falls off the edge. "Worlds Within the Margin" also breaks the five minute mark and is one of the darkest and harshest tracks on the record. It features a fine touch of symphonic elements which is rather unusual for the band. The symphonic extreme metal experiment sounds very promising though and it's sad that the band didn't push this combination of genres any further until today.

The other songs are generic melodic death metal. These tracks are short and to the point, feature a couple of harsh riffs and focus more on the vocals than before. The problem is that the vocals aren't very variable on here. The lyrics are also rather unimpressive. The riffs start to get repetitive after a while and the album doesn't include many heartbreaking melodic guitar solos. The rhythm section with bass guitar and drums is unimpressive. In Flames has never been a band centered on the rhythm instruments but this element has never been as inoffensive and unimportant as on this output. A more dynamical production would have helped to solve this problem.

In the end, Whoracle is not an abominable output but it is mostly boring, repetitive and uninspired. It's the most forgettable studio effort by a band that constantly tried out new things. It feels like an unmotivated rehash of The Jester Race where the band was just lazy and wanted to fool around a little bit. I can only recommend this release to faithful collectors and die-hard fans. It would have been a better choice to release this record as a short and entertaining EP featuring only the best tracks "Jotun", "Jester Script Transfigured", "Worlds Within the Margin", "Episode 666" and maybe the cover of "Everything Counts".

"Young and free, something you'll never be!". The first lines of Anthrax's sophomore output resume the band's spirit back in the days very well. The East Coast thrash metal legend performs carefree songs full of enthusiasm without any compromises. Stylistically, the band sounds still much closer to the New Wave of British Heavy Metal than to the pitiless thrash metal between liberatingly humorous lyrics and socially critical statements on later outputs. The cool main riff of "Madhouse" could be taken from a Judas Priest record of the early eighties while the harmonious guitar play and the high pitched chorus of "S.S.C./Stand or Fall" have obvious Iron Maiden influences. New singer Joey Belladonna offers his most enthusiastic performance and isn't afraid of high notes or fast passages. His technical struggles here and there are outpowered by his charming juvenile spirit. The tight rhythm section of bass guitar and drums harmonizes well and grooves, pushes and rushes us through nine vivid tracks. The guitar work is extraordinary as one can hear both tight heavy metal riffs and orgasmic melodic high-speed guitar solos in all tracks of this fun ride. 

Despite numerous influences from other bands, Anthrax always manages to add a surprising note to each song and keeps a high degree of original diversity without losing the carefree guiding line. Especially the opening moments of most tracks are courageous, entertaining and original. The humorous radioplay overture of the charismatic "Madhouse" reminds me of the thought provoking drama One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. The acoustic guitar opening of "S.S.C./Stand or Fall" almost recalls traditional flamenco influences. The drum play and sound effects in the beginning of "The Enemy" make almost any metal fan play air drums and bang his head. The folk infused sounds in the beginning of "Armed and Dangerous" that are carried on by appeasing acoustic guitars and heartbreaking electric guitar solos are atmospheric and progressive but nevertheless related to classic heavy metal. This is one of the most melodic and also outthought tracks ever written by the band. On the other side, Anthrax closes the record with its fastest song ever which is the chaotic and humorous "Gung Ho" where all instruments break loose towards the intentionally random ending.

There are only two songs I enjoy a little bit less on an otherwise incredibly strong output somewhere between classic heavy metal, American power and thrash metal and a small dose of hardcore punk. "Aftershock" has some interesting lyrics and can be seen as a hint at more politically inspired texts to come from the band but the chorus lacks energy and originality and the usually emotional guitar solos on this record are missing on this tune. "Medusa" is slightly better because of a solid heavy metal main riff and a great melodic vocal performance in the verses but the slightly psychedelic and noisy chorus is rather off-putting and plain weird as it doesn't fit at all to the rest of the song. If these two tracks weren't on the record, it would maybe be the best American heavy and power metal album of all times. Despite these two average tunes, this album still is a classic must have for fans of the aforementioned genres.

There is only one thing left to talk about. I would like to know what happened to Mister Brown. The mentally disabled patient welcomes his medicine with hysterical laughter in the beginning of "Madhouse" and one can hear him again during the chaotic and liberating party that is going on during "Gung Ho". Maybe he was able to escape from the madhouse as one can hear him again in another crowd during the performance of "Bud E Luv Bomb and Satan's Lounge Band", a b-side of the band's third record. As far as I know, he was never heard of again after his appearance during this crazy concert with a couple of drunkards in a social club. What happened to Mister Brown? I hope this secret will get revealed one day and that we might hear of him again on Anthrax's next studio record.

HammerFall has a very particular strength. While the band's song writing might be predictable and their musical qualities only of an average quality if compared to several genre colleagues, the band is able to write inredibly catchy songs that won't get out of your minds once you've heard them and you still can easily sing along to these tracks after consuming a case of beer. HammerFall may craft addicting party music, yet they put a healthy dose of emotions and honesty in the execution of their material. HammerFall could play a different kind of music as they have by now proven by releasing "Infected" five years after this effort but it wouldn't sound like the Swedish quintet. HammerFall may sound limited but they do what they do best and this simple attitude is actually highly efficient. "Threshold" perfectly resumes all of HammerFall's strengths and weaknesses in one album. Fans are going to love this release and admire its melodies, lyrics and joy while those who depise the band will claim that this record is too soft, too slow and too stereotyped. I believe this is one of their better records.

One of the band's strengths is to write epic half ballads with great guitar melodies and passionate vocals. "Dark Wings, Dark Words" might be an unspectacular mid-tempo track with a rather ordinary rhythm section from an objective point of view but the heart-breaking guitar solo in the middle part, the passionate and variable vocals and the glorious choirs in the heroic chorus make up for the lack of innovation. Emotions are more important for me than technical abilities in this genre and that's why this track is my favourite on the album. "Rebel Inside" hits a similar vein and is solely carried by engaged melodic vocals and beautiful guitar harmonies. Despite the plodding verses, the chorus erupts as a powerful statement about rebellion which is an important main theme in metal music.

There aren't any really fast and fierce tracks of a more traditional style of European power metal on the album but a couple of short and engaging mid-tempo power metal songs with heavier riffs and more powerful and less strained vocals that should please to genre fans. These tracks are short and to the point without any unnecessary distractions. One of the best examples is the epic single "The Fire Burns Forever" which was recorded for the European Athletic Championship. The track fits this topic from an atmospheric and lyrical point of view. "Howlin' with the Pac'" mixes epic sounds with a few meaner guitar melodies and a chorus where manly gang shouts meet almost androgynous high pitched vocals. It's a perfect song for groups of young metal heads as the lyrics deal with topics such as belonging, freedom and identity.

In the second half of the record, HammerFall shifts away from its balanced mixture of epic half ballads and short rebellious mid-tempo tracks and introduces a couple of longer songs based on atmospheric and slightly progressive instrumental sections and more serious lyrical topics. The majestic and almost sacral keyboard sounds introduce the enjoyable mid-tempo epic "Carved in Stone". "Titan" mixes desperate and powerful tones and features heavy metal riffs taken straight from the eighties with melodic choirs that could come from a rock band from the seventies. The song almost sounds like a mixture of Loudness and Queen. The most intriguing tune is the powerful up-tempo track "Genocide" that probably deals with the downfall of the heavy metal genre and in general with the fact that you should always hold on to your dreams no matter what. The mixture of longing and melancholic vocal lines and powerful riffs and solos on the other is a symbol for the resurrection of a weakened scene for me. Some of the heavier bands and their fans might ridicule a band like HammerFall but as a matter of fact, the Swedish quintet stands for the pillars of freedom, identification and otherness which are some of the genre's most important values like almost no other band. HammerFall manages to deal with these topics without sounding pretentious, didactic or arrogant. This is the main reason why this band still deserves a healthy dose of attention and respect no matter if the band concurs with your own musical tastes.

In the end, this one of HammerFall's better releases. This is largely due to the quite balanced mixture of short and heavy power metal tracks, emotionally crafted melancholic half-ballads and atmospheric epics with lyrical depth. The guitar solos on the record are spot on and especially the energizing, honest and passionate vocal performance is the best in Joacim Cans' career so far in my humble opinion. "Threshold" is an album that should please to most fans of the band and it's also my recommendation if you wanted to get to know this band and didn't know where to start discovering them. There might be better HammerFall albums but this release stands for both past and contemporary HammerFall and represents the spirit and values of this band like no other release. Get together with a few friends on a Friday night, get something to drink, crank up the volume, play this record and have a great time!