“I AM METAL!” barks our hero, Herr Boltendahl, rather obviously on the track bearing the same name from the man’s first solo album, Reborn In Flames. As entries in the ‘stating the bleedin’ obvious’ stakes go, this is a nailed-on winner, obviously, with the only surprise being that Chris feels the need to remind us all of his ferrous credentials…

Chris, of course, has been metal for over forty years in his day job as head man over at Grave Digger. So it’s very much business as usual in the Steelhammer camp for a man so mired in Germany’s metal consciousness as to rival Udo Dirkschneider for the role of grand old man of German metal vocalisation. It’s interesting that he’s housed this first solo effort under the aegis of a new ‘band’, Steelhammer, almost as if he lacks the confidence to go out alone under the just-as-metal BOLTENDAHL banner; that’s a ridiculous thing to think, clearly, because as soon as he opens his pie hole there’s only one man who could be behind the mic on stomping slabs of Teutonic overkill like Fire Angel or Let The Evil Rise. But the fact that Chris is unwilling, or unable, to move away even for one song from the sound that made his name is going to be a disappointment for some.

At the end of the day it’s that sound that’s probably the main problem with RiF, rotten cover of Midnight Oil‘s Beds Are Burning notwithstanding; Boltendahl’s style is so obvious, and so entrenched, songs like the superbly mayhemic Iron Christ end up sounding no different to anything Grave Digger have done over the last decade. True, the subject matter is probably a little more varied here than on the average GD album, but no amount of input from the other band members – all yeoman German metallers in their own right, with time done in names like Iron Savior, Scanner and Orden Ogan – can alter the fact that this is what it is – and that’s just another collection of bluster and bombast from Boltendahl. An opportunity missed, I think…

Reborn In Flames Is Out Now.