Review: Neck Cemetery “Born in a Coffin” [Reaper Entertainment Europe]

If you want to start 2021 with some old fashioned, feel good, leather-waistcoat-wearing trve metal anthems, then look no further than Neck Cemetery’s Born in a Grave.

You might be left confused after stumbling through that cover art, around the band name, and past the logo only to find an entertaining, swashbuckling album that doesn’t take itself too seriously without crossing over into parody (too much). But let’s be clear – the music is excellent: crispy production, surging tempos, and fist pumping singalongs with all 5 members pulling in the direction of their influences (Maiden, Manowar, Priest) to make music as sweet and crunchy as a perfectly cooked stir-fry. Not even the metal snobs and purists can deny how catchy and fun the tracks are.

This is an album of 2 halves, however, as beyond the unmistakable musical talent lie lyrical crimes you and your school chums would commit when hashing together song ideas for your first teenage band – rhyming grave with brave, room and doom, bone with stone… you get the idea. But coming from a band whose first release was called Death by Banging and have a one-eyed, decapitated skeleton clad in a denim vest on the cover of Born, what did you expect? And, hey, being from Cologne, English isn’t their mother tongue – any attempt on my part to write a song in German would involve looking at my old Year 9 schoolbook only to attempt rhyming a type of sausage with a type of excrement. So, if you can look past knee-slapping tales of foreign lands, castles of fear, and whispering winds climaxing in the final track’s ‘all of my sisters in metal unite’, you’re in for a treat.

Fading in with an engine-like rev and ending on an epic close-of-show riff, this album is done well and done with charm. It’s the perfect music to enjoy with your old man on Father’s Day to rekindle his heavy metal days, so dig out his old denim jacket and sew Neck Cemetery’s patch on to save him the time.

Release date: October 9th, 2020

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