Manowar – Into Glory Ride (1982)

Somewhat like Black Sabbath’s second album being more Black Sabbath than their first, the same happens with Manowar on this second album. From beginning to end it lives and breathes what fans expect of Manowar. Perhaps the only remnant of past dependence lies in the opening track, where we still feel the stadium party tendency of Judas Priest. The rest of Into Glory Ride, however, is most decisively committed to the epic side of metal’s metal.

An admirable quality of Manowar’s music is that they’re not afraid of changing gears mid-song, thereby contributing to the narrative. And therein lies the success of the method: they only ever do that to fit a natural curve in a story they’re literally telling. It’s never a musical gimmick (and any of our readers and listeners of our podcasts will know how much we abhor gimmicks). 

It might seem too much to say in the case of Manowar, but let us put it another way. The characteristic gimmicks of Manowar’s music are surface details, the approach to singing, and the narrowly defined style itself. Within those constraints, they create compelling guitar solos, and unique narratives that adhere to their blossoming style, and their sound as a band, in this album, but they’re distinct from each other. So you might say that once you’ve heard a few Manowar songs, you’ve heard all Manowar songs. But that’s only true of general style, voicing, and language. But the creations change, evolve, and mold themselves along different stories and themes within their chosen genre.

I might earn the ire of Judas Priest fans when saying this, but Manowar quickly started to outdo the British “kings” in terms of what they do with heavy metal for compelling and developed narratives. We could even observe that Iron Maiden themselves only surpass them in their appeal to radio, and in their variety. For the deep end of metal, however, Manowar has something akin to the soon-to-appear Candlemass.

The over-the-topness here displayed, the theater on stage and all, comes through to the mythologically-aware listener as more serious, more convincing, than the aloof (and often ironic) approach of Iron Maiden. This consistent seriousness about the underlying spirit observed also in Bathory and lacking in Celtic Frost, inherited by black metal more than death metal, reveals the key to what ‘true’ implies in metal music. There is a point where the unironic fan of metal music understands, at least at some psychological level, that the greatest depths of art require an investment in the authenticity of the symbol.

Towards the middle and end of the album has once and for all become “power metal”, epic and stately, adventurous and inspiring, rousing in a heroic way, far beyond the playfulness of Iron Maiden or Judas Priest. The tinges of happiness that the music still presents are those of a smiling glory, of riding into battle, of a triumphant conqueror, accepting the death of his enemies as a matter of course, impersonal and even necessary. He simply does not think in the same terms as modern sterile man, he simply accomplishes and lives life fully, channeling the gods in the most extreme deeds that exalt the soul in the light of the divine.