Opening track ‘Shine On’ misleads you for a second, but turns into a fantastic power metal track – as well as the most logical first single – with a couple of fantastic melodies courtesy of Morikawa. Throughout recent years, many keyboards carrying the main melodies crept through Anthem’s songs, but ‘Absolute World’ is very much a guitar riff driven album. However, what counts in the end are the songs and Shibata has once again written a collection of fantastic heavy metal and power metal tracks. In addition, Isamu Tamaru became the band’s full time drummer, after replacing Hiro Homma during his injury. Admittedly, I sometimes miss Sakamoto’s primal energy, but Morikawa’s performance on the album is stellar. His replacement – for the second time in Anthem history – is Yukio Morikawa, who has obviously aged since he last worked with the band on ‘Domestic Booty’, but still has a set of pipes many young singers can be jealous of. Iconic singer Eizo Sakamoto left the band after the album’s predecessor ‘Burning Oath’. In fact, it is on par with ‘Immortal’ and ‘Black Empire’ as the band’s best post-reunion albums. ‘Absolute World’ is one more piece of evidence proving that the band can still make fantastic records over three decades into their career. The result: Anthem exclusively released solid, quality heavy metal records throughout their career.

While many old school heavy metal bands had an enormous identity crisis in the nineties due to the rise of alt-rock and – in this case – visual kei, Naoto Shibata did the right thing he put his band Anthem to rest until new artistic and business opportunities presented themselves.

Anthem absolute world 2014