Volbeat - Rewind, Replay, Rebound

Even though I started this blog in 2017 and was pretty busy with writing about new music on it from the get go, I still wrote about two albums from the previous year. One was Gojira’s Magma, my favorite album of 2016, which I consider perfect for my sense of the word, and one that I have yet to hear a more recent album better than (though Khemmis came close last year). The other album was Volbeat’s Seal the Deal & Let’s Boogie, which I considered to be the most disappointing album of 2016. For as much shit as they got from the detractors that accompanied their meteoric rise in notoriety, Volbeat truly were bringing something fresh, exciting, and downright fun with their ardent combination of energetic rock ‘n’ roll, thrash, rockabilly, and classic heavy metal on albums like Guitar Gangsters and Cadillac Blood and Rock the Rebel / Metal the Devil. The smooth and seemingly effortless blending of the distant genres’ elements through the modernization of the punk/rock ‘n’ roll essence through crunchy metallic guitars and tight, energetic rhythms made them a standout act already at the instrumental level, but it was lead singer Michael Poulsen’s boisterous, soaring tenor and slick Elvis/Cash vocal stylings that really brought it all home. And I personally have enjoyed the band’s unique style at its most potent, which, thankfully has been the majority of their catalog.

The band started picking up wind with the success of several songs from their fourth album, Beyond Hell / Above Heaven, which was their most diverse batch of songs to date, from the emotive pop-punk-tinged rockers “Magic Zone” and Fallen”, to the thrashy “Who They Are”, to the growling death metal of “Evelyn”. And this varied song-writing continued onto their fifth album, Outlaw Gentlemen & Shady Ladies, whose track list rather closely mirrored the diversity on Beyond Hell / Above Heaven, but it was the success of the single “Lola Montez” that ultimately brought Volbeat to a whole new level of notoriety, and unfortunately to a position that came with the evident pressure to recreate the success of the song that brought them there, which is where 2016′s Seal the Deal & Let’s Boogie comes in.

The follow-up album to the “Lola Montez” success found the band seemingly neutered, micromanaged, unenthusiastic, and at a loss for ideas that would fit in the mold they found themselves forced into. With rehash after rehash of the successful 2013 single, Seal the Deal & Let’s Boogie was a project with a transparent objective of cloning the band’s radio success, and with the band sounding uncharacteristically un-fun, I can’t help but think it was most likely due to outside pressures. Needless to say, my nerves were pretty tense going into this album, hoping to God that one of my favorite bands of my later high school years wouldn’t succumb to radio-baiting drivel, that Seal the Deal & Let’s Boogie was just a fluke. So what do we get from Rewind, Replay, Rebound?

Well, relief, to put it simply. The band seems to have taken to heart the concerns of fans about their sound getting recycled, and they seem to have clearly made some efforts to break out of the mold they’ve been imprisoned in. They do still resort to compositional habits from time to time, but it’s not nearly as consistently recycled as the bulk of their previous record.

“Last Day Under the Sun” kicks the album off on an upbeat alternative rock note with its rapidly strummed major guitar chords; the chorus is a bit repetitive, but I like the way the gospel choir vocals bring it to a soulful high on the last repeat before the end. The song “Pelvis on Fire” is a quick, heavy, punk-y lust anthem that calls back to and melodically resembles “Sad Man’s Toungue” during its verses. The quick tempo and dance-y vibes keep coming on the songs “Die to Live”, whose featuring of the gruff vocal melodies of Clutch’s Neil Fallon and whose ragtime piano and wailing sax really help it make for one of the most fun moments on the album.

The band get Scooby Doo spooky on the more minor key, seemingly werewolf-themed “Sorry Sack of Bones”, which comes with these well-placed samples of echoed wolf howls that make the campy subject matter all the more conducive to the underlying fun of the song. The otherwise peppy “Cheapside Sloggers” takes a similarly minor-key-flavored turn into Anthrax-flavored thrash with the bridges palm-muted groove and Gary Holt’s guest solo diverting the song into oddly brooding and territory. The band dip into the more heavily metallic side of their earlier work on “The Everlasting”, and though it’s still not the most compositionally thrilling Volbeat song, it’s a decent offering of the band’s older style.

Songs like the nostalgic anthem “When We Were Kids” (whose bridge’s string section I do actually quite enjoy), the sappy “Cloud 9”, the “Lola Montez”-esque “The Awakening of Bonnie Parker”, and the moderately soulful “Maybe I Believe” feel a little more compositionally and stylistically typical for the band, but even when these songs do tend more toward the band’s stylistic norms and . The closing track, “7:24”, is definitely the sappiest moment on the album, about Poulsen’s connection to his family from afar while on tour, the song’s acoustic balladry only emphasizes the sappiness of the lyrics, which I know probably makes me sound like a heartless asshole for not liking the song about Michael loving his family, but I will say I appreciate the sentiment of the song, and I’m glad Michael loves his family enough to write about them. I’d rather Michael love his family so much that he write a kind of cheesy tribute to them than not love them and not write that song.

The album’s brightest highlight is probably the emotive alternative metal power ballad “Rewind the Exit”, whose soaring, heartfelt chorus is probably the most potent that Volbeat have done since Beyond Hell / Above Heaven. The power of the band to invoke such catharsis through alternative metal instrumentation reminds me of songs like The Offspring’s “Gone Away” and Linkin Park’s “In the End”.

The album does eventually wear thin by about two thirds of the way through, but even in its lesser moments, it’s clearly more passionately created than its predecessor. Volbeat still seem to be in a creative rut, but this album is far more respectable for its apparent attempt to find ways out of that rut than the doubling down on the inflating of their creative deficit of Seal the Deal & Let’s Boogie. I do wish this album brought back a little more of the indulgently rock ‘n’ roll swagger beyond “Pelvis on Fire” on this album to counterbalance the alternative metal stylings of late that they still can’t seem to shake for more than one or two tracks at a time. The band’s stricter adherence to feel-good alternative rock lately kind of suppresses the vocal talents and more unique style of MIchael Poulsen, who still sounds great on the tracks here, but who I wish I could say is performing and wish I could hear performing at his full potential on this album. But honestly, I’m just glad to hear the band sounding like they actually want to be playing/making these songs. I’m just glad the last album didn’t permanently suck them into the void of radio rock that was clearly intent on pimping their talent and bastardizing their uniqueness. As relieving as this album is, though, I don’t know if my fears for the next album are completely quelled. As long as Volbeat has notoriety, I think whoever is backing them financially will be in it for the “Lola Montez” money and will be pushing for that kind of material from them. So while it’s not realistic to expect this now-headlining band to make albums like Guitar Gangsters & Cadillac Blood again, I do hope they continue to keep a strong enough tie to their roots, not for nostalgia’s sake, but because they prove themselves to be creatively and performatively potent through that channel. For now though, I am content with the bounce-back of Rewind, Replay, Rebound.

, Relief/10