Power from the Universe is the second album from the British NWOBHM band Battleaxe. It takes me thirty seconds to realize that this is the read deal. This is music that I gre up with that don’t really exist anymore. I was just a teenager so this type of music really formed my identity back in the day. Think about early Saxon, early Iron Maiden ,and maybe Tygers of Pan Tang to visualize the sound. For me, I also think a bit of Spinal Tap, and I mean that with the highest respect. I don’t make any parallels to parody or something like that.
You can easily tell that this is music from the early 80’s. This particular edition is remastered and has a couple of extra songs and it sound very good. The sound quality surely doesn’t suffer from washed out mixes from back in the day. It’s good quality despite it being Metal from the 80s. If you were active back then and listen to those old albums today you’ll know what I mean. The sound from those bands older records tends to sound pretty thing these days.
Even though Battleaxe and Power from the Universe is rooted in the NWOBHM movement I’m still a little indecisive if this actually is Heavy Metal or Hardrock. Back then the differences were smaller between these genres and it could often be differentiated due to the bands origin and it was more semantics than really musical differences that distinguished the styles.
Where I grew up, everything was Hardrock. The term Metal wasn’t really invented. Well, of course it was invented but Hardrock was the umbrella genre. I think that has change quite a bit since them Nowadays I think that Hardrock is placed under the umbrella genre Metal. It’s really confusing.
But I really like Power from the Universe and I wonder why I didn’t know about Battleaxe back in the day. Possible because it was a British band and I was in Sweden. Only the most successful bands were available here. And there were little to no radioplay of these bands either. One hour a week of heavy music was all we got here in Sweden back then.
But better late than never. I need to explore this further. Power from the Universe sounds vital today even though the sound sounds a bit dated. But on the other hand. Timeless music is just that – timeless!
