It doesn’t really fit on the album at all, lyrically, or musically, but it makes it into any Manowar playlist I make. Lyrically Its just typical Manowar fun (‘’From a hall I heard thunder and screams/I walked inside so I could hear/And the guy beside me gave me a beer’’). Musically, it’s a stompy mid-tempo track. Tellingly the song I like the most, ‘Die For Metal’ is a semi-bonus track that sits outside the concept. Even then however, I feel they did better versions of this type of material on the albums directly before and after this one. ‘King Of Kings,’ ‘Sleipnir,’ ‘Sons Of Odin’ and ‘Loki God Of Fire’ are all exactly the style of Manowar I love the best, and some of the material outside that style, such as choral sounding ‘Army Of The Dead, Part II’ is quite entertaining. Of course, that’s not to say it is devoid of quality.
Its all personal preference of course, but this is definitely my least favourite Manowar record stylistically. I have Mars Volta albums that get to the point faster than this! There’s also quite a high ratio of ballads to fast tracks. Two in a row, before the album really kicks off. I mean, strangest of all, the first two tracks are in effect intros. Even tracks which aren’t intros have partial intros or outros. Its 16 tracks long, and I would classify a full 6 of those as skippable intros. I guess it stands to reasons that Gods Of War is my least favourite album, as it is a narration filled concept album that has a lot of intros. I can also be fifty-fifty on the ballads.
My favourite things about Manowar are usually the fast and hard double-kick filled metal songs or stompy mid-paced grooving songs, and my least favourite bits are the intros/outros, spoken word narrations and indulgent solos. That being said, there is one album I don’t really like – their tenth studio album, 2007’s Gods Of War. Some fans say they haven’t made any good albums since the 80s and I’ll disagree with that all day long. I keep a vinyl copy of Kings Of Metal framed on my wall, they’re my 8th most-listened to band of the past 12 years according to LastFM, and I’ll defend them to the death whenever anyone makes fun of them or calls them silly. I may have been a bit sceptical when I first heard them, but they have grown and grown in my estimation over the years. Manowar have really become one of my favourite band’s over the past 6 years.
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