If you’ve been keeping up with Saxon – and you should’ve been – then you know that they’re still going strong after damn near forty years. 2013’s Sacrifice was proof enough that the old chaps haven’t lost any steam, and if you didn’t believe it then, then Battering Ram will (ahem) hammer the point home quite nicely. Like the one before it, it offers no surprises – just quality Saxon metal, no more and no less, and that’s exactly what Saxon fans want.
Like Sacrifice, Battering Ram starts off at its heaviest, opening with its title track, this one a straight-ahead metal pounding that lives up to its name. It’s another Saxon song about the power of metal, the camaraderie of rock, and it’s as grand an entry into their canon as anything they’ve created in the past two decades. Biff Byford’s wail belies his 64 years – he’s not lost a step, his voice as strong now as it’s ever been. The guitar tandem of Scarratt and Quinn rips through riffs with their trademark aplomb, whilst Nigel Glockler pounds his drums like a man half his age.
From there, Battering Ram displays a strong first half – the classic horror story of “The Devil’s Footprint” rides a crunchy riff, thankfully strong enough to overcome its goofy spoken-word introduction (performed by Hell vocalist David Bower). The stuttering cyclical opening of “Queen Of Hearts” was enough to convince me my iPod broke the first two times I heard it, but the song itself was certainly strong enough to get me past that minor confusion. That one’s a chugging mid-tempo, a tale of the timeless Through The Looking Glass characters with a relentless groove and some more modernized riffing that steps outside Saxon’s usual trad-metal comfort zone.
And as strong as Battering Ram begins, it bookends itself with a few killers, as well, most notably the Mt. Everest-themed “Top Of The World” and the haunting “In Flanders Fields” WW1 epic “Kingdom Of The Cross.” The spoken-word sections of that one hold up far stronger than the silliness that precedes “Devils Footprint,” even if it is also a bit heavy-handed. Finally, the rollicking good-time “Three Sheets To The Wind” closes things in fun, if not particularly profound fashion – “Feeling like a trainwreck / never gonna drink again … / we were three sheets to the wind.” (Of course, I wouldn’t know anything about that…)
Bits of Battering Ram’s middle section get to be somewhat Saxon-by-numbers, which is really the album’s only negative strike. There’s the obligatory song about speedy transportation, this one titled “Hard And Fast,” and a tune about not taking crap from anyone, appropriately titled “Stand Your Ground.” There’s even another song about the power of rock, this one about the band’s appreciation of the audience, “Before we go, just let me know / will you be with us to the end.” And of course, the Saxon faithful will be, both because of and despite the fact that these tunes feel familiar and yet new in equal measure. It’s Saxon, and we’ve heard that before, but this is new Saxon, a Saxon yet unheard, even if it’s anything but surprising that the result is a damned solid ball of rock.
In the pantheon of Saxon, does Battering Ram compare to Wheels Of Steel? To Strong Arm Of The Law, or to Power And The Glory? No, but few records do. Battering Ram is every bit as good as it should be, as good as Sacrifice, which was better than Into The Labyrinth or Call To Arms. Saxon fans can argue the specific splits of post-millennium Saxon, the hair’s breadth between Inner Sanctum and Lionheart and whatever, but these past two have been damned strong, the band playing with a renewed energy and bringing some numbers that hit straight to the heart and to the head.
In the end, it comes to this: Saxon still rocks, at times even harder now than before. They’re lifers, one of the most consistently great metal bands of all time. Sure, it’s all variations upon a long-established theme, but regardless, this is still first-class, a great metal record for anyone who likes straight-ahead heavy metal.
And long live these lifers, for this is their power and this is their glory.
