RAVEN Rock Until you drop is an interesting release. It rocks but it rocks faster than almost anything that came out before it. Raven had been around since 1974 but this didn’t come out until 1981. This album would have been unbelievable if this had come out a few years earlier, but who knows? Maybe it wouldn’t have been as good. Musically speaking this is a musically very advanced album and takes what Judas Priest were doing and takes it to a new level of speed and technicality.
From the opening of “Hard Ride”, it’s obvious what we have here is a high-speed rock and roll riffing with heavy metal distortion on the guitars type of album with the piercing vocals you’d expect from the early 80’s and some great drumming. The second song “Hell Patrol” is where it really kicks in, again as with a lot of albums I wonder why they didn’t open up with this one. It’s much more representative of their sound. I mentioned above, that I felt it was a shame they didn’t manage to get this album out a few years earlier as I really think they’d have ridden the wave of Judas Priests popularity and not gotten lost in the New Wave of British Heavy Metal as you’d already had a lot of major bands put out their first record around the time this came out. By the time this came out you had the new extremes of Venom and Mercyful Fate for those who wanted something heavier than Priest. Or if you just wanted a more straight ahead metal sound Iron Maiden had also released their debut that year.
The album for the most part doesn’t really let up for the whole way through the album save one acoustic guitar interlude. My Fave tracks would be “For the Future” and “Lambs to the Slaughter” which has some great mid paced riffage (still some great fast bits in there too though) but really again this is one of those albums where you either like it or you don’t, but their style is pretty consistent through the album. “Rock Until you Drop” is a good fist pounding anthem as well. I have to say while the riffage is really good on this, John’s vocals are awesome too, they’d give Halford a good run for his money, infact I’m not sure I’d heard Halford belt out screams like this this early in the peice. Might have to go back and check that out. I don’t know why these dudes didn’t really take off a lot further than they did as this album had some level of success reaching into the 60’s on the UK charts but they didn’t really seem to be able to capitalise on the start this album gave them. I guess that’s the business.
Either way, you’ve got a great and more importantly, fun Heavy Metal album to listen to with this one. It’s definitely worth a listen from both an entertainment and historical perspective and there’s some brilliant riffage littered though out this album!
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