ALBUM REVIEW: Servant Of The Mind – Volbeat

Listening to VOLBEAT is like tucking into a home-cooked meal your mother’s made. It’s warm and welcoming; you soak up the familiar taste of homeliness you’ve come to expect. The older you get, the more this taste becomes a sepia-toned memory of better days. Their eighth album Servant Of The Mind, like a hearty meal from dear old mum, is the first sign of the rockabilly pioneers running out of steam and relying on their rulebook – and others.

Spending time with Servant Of The Mind is as close to playing bingo with Michael Poulsen, Jon Larsen, Rob Caggiano and Kaspar Boye Larsen as you’ll get. As you work your way from opener Temple Of Ekur’s melodic metal waltz to seven-minute closer Lasse’s Birgitta’s take on latter-day METALLICA‘s diluted thrash-cum-prog, you’ll find yourself using your mecca dauber more times than you can count.

Playing it safe for a pandemic album isn’t a bad thing. In fact, VOLBEAT’s fever for riotous rockabilly and feel-good riff-and-roll is to sad bangers what ice cream is to sadness. It’s comfort listening at its finest. But should a band eight albums in and on the cusp of bursting through the mainstream bubble be playing it so safe?

There are attempts across Servant Of The Mind to amp up their signature sound. For the most part they fall short of the mark; the likes of Say No More and Becoming sound like VOLBEAT tried to make their own Hardwired-era METALLICA by listening to AVENGED SEVENFOLD’s Hail To The King. Elsewhere, The Sacred Stones switches to the wild-west prog we’ve come to expect from IRON MAIDEN, while the aforementioned closer pits thrash metal, prog-rock, and their own rockabilly together in a cage match of madness.

If you could divvy up Servant Of The Mind’s 13 tracks into two separate playlists, you’d have a far stronger set of songs on each side. The twiddly, thrashier experiments would sit well together but feel out of place in bed with the album’s fleeting, yet more brilliant, moments. When VOLBEAT play to their strengths, they do it better than ever, with quick bursts of brilliance offering some of their catchiest songs since their 2005 cover of I Only Wanna Be With You. Wait A Minute My Girl packs a 60s high school prom punch with saxophone solos, glimmering piano and a beat that makes you shimmy and shake to oblivion. ALPHABEAT vocalist Stine Bramsen’s appearance on Dagen Før is the end-of-summer soundtrack 80s movies made so magical, lending a pop-rock sensibility to their rockabilly roadshow.

When VOLBEAT stick to what they know, they sound more vital than ever. However, their moments of mutation on Servants Of The Mind sound like a blockbuster band running out of steam. Can they continue to take over the world on nostalgia alone?

Rating: 6/10

Servant Of The Mind is set for release on December 3rd via EMI Records.

Like VOLBEAT on Facebook.