| CD REVIEW Rage |
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Band : Rage Early last year, Rage re-released of their 2008 album Carved In Stone in a limited edition digipack set also including their newest EP Gieb Dich Nie Auf (review by myself was posted 08/02), and this as part of a series of special events concerning the band’s 25th anniversary. The year was busy enough, with plenty of tours and guitarist Victor Smolski also releasing an album with Mind Odyssey and putting in several workshops (drummer Andre Hilgers also did a few of those). Need to mention, Rage enlisted in the German preselections for Eurovision, and had quite some fun running in the Bundesvision selections. Second item: Rage’s outstanding performance at Wacken Open Air, where several guest musicians (former Rage and now Stratovarius’ Jörg Michael, Destruction’s Schmier, Blind Guardian’s Hansi Kürsch, Subway To Sally’s Eric Fish, and Rage/ Blind Guardian backing singer Jen Majura) joined the band on stage. Third item: mid July Hilgers became father of healthy daughter Samantha Pearl (check for relevance further in this same review). By the end of that same month, the trio was going into pre-production for the new album, which was recorded during August at Twilight Halo Studios in a co-production between Smolski and longtime friend Charlie Bauerfeind (known from his numerous productions including albums with Helloween, Hammerfall, and oh-so many more)! Well, Strings To A Web contains all the elements we’ve gotten used to over the years: a bunch of their typical anthemic Teuton Thrash tracks as well as some with Neo-Classical influences (in this case the “center piece “Empty Hollow”, actually a 5-track thing lasting almost 17 minutes). I’m not sure, but perhaps the wait for newest addition to Rage’s Rocking Family hasn’t been an uneventful one, with a track titled “Hellgirl” (includes the sounds of a typical un-happy female sibling) being featured on the album. Of course, and as usual, there’s a couple of “softer” moments on the album as well, and with “Connected” and “Through Ages”, the guys have ballads in the orchestrally-accompanied and Rock trio mode respectively. In keeping up with a Rage tradition, the album’s limited edition finds a nice bonus for the fans in the form of an added DVD, the main part of which is the footage from their 2009 Wacken performance…with extra live clips from their 2009 show at Masters Of Rock and in Sofia. The DVD is rounded off with a short insight into Smolski’s second passion in life besides music (would that be car racing, I wonder…nót!). Of course, the DVD info is second-hand, as in the promo download age of today, record labels have not gotten around to making DVDs available for the press that way. At myspace.com/rage, you can find full-length mp3-files for “Empty Hollow” (forgot to check whether that’s the whole “suite”, or just the song), “Purified”, and “Into The Light”. If you need more to persuade yourself of the buying or not-buying of the album, go check the album out at your local record store, which is almost certain to have a copy in stock! 90/100 “Rage”-ing Tony. |