MANOWAR – Fire And Blood

Happy new year, ye all. No, I didn’t relocate to Alabama, still stuck in freezing paralyzing Oslo, where my fingers froze before Christmas and needed a solid dose of Viagra to recover. It’s time to salute 2003, and what a good way it is, to start waffling about the new double Manowar DVD released on SPV. Check out Metal Express’ amazing competition, by the way. If you can tell us how many times Eric sings “Blood”, “Steel”, “Power” and “Sword” on all the studio records, divided with how many women Joey made comments on during the last 14 days, we will ship you this DVD 😉

Probably the best DVD released in the music business, at least the heavy metal genre (easy match as all others are false anyway), disc 1 is the documentary for the “Hell On Stage” tour, leading to the incredible live album with the same name. I bet Manowar had to take a lot of shit from people saying that their first DVD, “Hell On Earth”, was too much a documentary and didn’t have many live songs in full versions. “Hell On Earth” was very successful if it was meant to be a documentary only, but of course, as Manowar never released a live DVD/video before, I think the diehards wanted that and could easily wait another few years for the documentary. So the mighty kings did it the other way around, and this double set will easily make all the critics shut up and remain silent, not only for the total running time of close to 5 hours, but forever!

So, back to disc 1; like I said; it has the magic from that incredible tour of 1998, of which I was happy to pay a few visits. Sure, you hear lots of “men’s talk”, you see a lot of devoted fans, but with full versions of “Bridge Of Death”, “Guyana”, “Dark Avenger” and “Hatred” (sorry Leif Edling; THIS is the heaviest song ever written!), my God, it wasn’t Viagra that helped my fingers get active again! If you don’t praise this disc – you simply don’t know what heavy metal is!

Disc 2, the infamous Monsters of Rock performance in Brazil 1998, God how I wish I was there. You just have to see it to believe it. If you don’t – again – you don’t know what heavy metal is!

Like that isn’t enough, there is tons of bonus material available, 5.1 Dolby, and whatever else. This is a must, and I think you have gotten to understand that by now. If not, leave the hall, leave this web site, leave life behind!!!