VOLBEAT

REWIND, REPLAY, REBOUND

VERTIGO

Danish metallers finally land the knockout blow

MICHAEL POULSEN HAS been agitating for metal’s heavyweight title ever since he put together Volbeat nearly 20 years ago. He’s come close – hell, with James Hetfield as your cornerman, you would be have to be either unlucky or plain stupid not to get noticed – but he’s never quite landed the knockout punch. If anything is going to change that, it’s Rewind, Replay, Rebound. The Danes’ seventh album is the point where every single element of what they do clicks perfectly into place, the culmination of Michael’s transformation from glowering ex-death metal malcontent into bona fide contender for the genre’s next great figurehead.

Volbeat’s strength was always their uniqueness. No other band thought to marry steel-plated metal skews closer to hard rock than traditional metal, best embodied by blockbusting opening track , whose potentenough-potentenough-to-fell-an-elephant chorus is augmented by a gospel choir. Not that they’ve jettisoned their rock’n’roll mojo – comes on like Elvis Presley in a cut-off Metallica T-shirt, while the brilliant Neil Fallon duet joins the dots between rock’n’roll and thrash, complete with barrelhouse piano and blazing sax. But the most striking difference of all comes via Michael himself. It sounds like he’s realised that his idiosyncractic vocal style – Papa Het impersonating Elvis in the style of a strangulated goose – was one of the barriers preventing Volbeat from making the jump to the next level. He’s dialled all that right back – what’s left is pure rock’n’roll attitude that should shut the band’s haters up once and for all.