| Above
all, though, there’s the album-closing “Powerslave,”
which is not a song I knew prior to getting A Tribute to the Beast,
since by the time Powerslave was released in 1984 I had moved on from
Iron Maiden to the Sisters of Mercy, trading one somewhat pretentious
but terrifically fun working-class English band for another. “Powerslave”
is here performed by Darkane, who are quite simply one of the best
bands working today, in metal or elsewhere. They’re Swedes, and
they made an album a year or two ago called Insanity that’s
been in or near my CD player since it came out, and they sound like
nobody else in the world. They are so good that their presence alone
makes the album worth recommending. There aren’t many bands of
that stature, but Darkane are one of them. Their sound is a combination
of bombastic operatic metal, crunching death, melodic Swedish prog-metal,
and the sort of idiosyncratic personal touches that usually originate
a little further east, in Finland. We here at Last Plane to Jakarta
number their next album high on our list of Records We Wish Would
Come Out Right Now, Before We Get Any Crankier. Their reading of “Powerslave”
is seven minutes and twelve seconds of fidelity to the original’s
eighties metal heart intersecting brashly with Darkane’s runaway-freight-train-soaring-
through-the-Swedish-countryside-after-midnight-with- ten-boxcars-full-of-dynamite-in-tow
routine. Darkane’s rendering of the song’s climax is a clear
and unambiguous declaration of what heavy metal is all about. |
