According to record collector bible Discogs, this is the twenty seventh version of Raven‘s third album All For One, and High Roller are the eighteenth record company to take a turn at wringing some cash out of the album. Obviously, if you are a Raven completist, the lure of a new version of the album (remastered from an unreleased Megaforce sterling cutting!), rendered in purple, olive green or grey vinyl will be too much to resist; for the rest of us, it might just be worth waiting until the band gets it’s hands on the rights to their back catalogue (which, according to band bassist/vocalist/founder John Gallagher, is something that will happen) so that the funds from any future purchases end up in the right pockets…

Gripe over, this is as good a time as any to revisit All For One. A big step up from it’s predecessor Wiped Out sonically – this time the band were in the knob-twiddling hands of at the time up-and-coming German producer Michael Wagener and Accept vocalist Udo Dirkschneider, All For One was the album that saw the band finding their feet, direction wise; If Wiped Out launched a thousand nascent thrash metal dreams across the US and mainland Europe, this record, despite being the one that gave the band the chance to tour America with junior headbangers Metallica, actually saw the band moving away slightly from their crash, bang wallop origins, maturing at such a rapid rate that the major labels could no longer ignore them.

Wagener’s production is central to this – Athletic Rock may have been the name the band gave to the path they’d decided to embark on, but it wouldn’t have been half so convincing if the sound had been produced at label Neat Records’ Impulse Studios on a budget of five quid and all the brown ale the band could consume. All For One, then, definitively mark’s Raven’s progression up the metal ladder from promising newcomers to real contenders.

Obviously that meant shedding a few long-term supporters as songwriting improved and primal, off-the-chain madness ceased to be the main point of attraction. Songs like Take Control and Break The Chain are classically gonzoid, eighties meal anthems that wouldn’t have seemed out of place on an Anvil album, whilst the title track and Mind Over Metal took what the band had been doing before and refined it to razor-sharp precision. The fun inherent in all the band’s best material remained – the little quotation from the French National Anthem thrown in to the Muskateer-inspired title track is a stroke of genius, despite being historically inaccurate, and the inclusion of single b-side The Ballad of Marshall Stack – always my fave Raven song, as it goes – also shows that a smile was never far from the lips of Gallagher and his guitar-mangling sibling Mark and drummer Rob ‘Wacko’ Hunter…

Sledgehammer Rock is a delirious fusion of Slade and Judas Priest at their most radio-friendly, whilst Run Silent Run Deep showed the band were ready to take on the big boys in the song writing maturity stakes; Taken as a stand-alone album, outside of the context of the band’s history, it’s hard to argue with anything here – even the band’s take on boring old chestnut Born To Be Wild (featuring a demented-sounding Dirkschneider on guest vocals) gets a pass – and this album stands still as one of the most enjoyable forty minutes of British heavy metal ever committed to wax…

All For One releases on May 14th.