This review will be something a bit different than what you may have gotten used to from this site. A somewhat more personal story, perhaps. If that doesn’t sound like it would be up your alley, please feel free to skip this one and come back for the next proper Album of the Week review in two days. However, I feel the need to talk about this Hammerheart Records reissue of Defender’s ‘City ad Mortis’, because the bonus tracks on this particular version of the album are a dream come true for me, in a way. Allow me to explain.

‘City ad Mortis’ has been my favorite Dutch heavy metal album since the second I heard it, though at five tracks and not even twenty minutes of music, the original 1987 release really qualifies as an EP. The melodic and reasonably complex speed metal, with fantastic vocals by Simon Menting, was exactly what I was looking for in my early teens, and that was before I found out that Defender is actually from the region of the Netherlands where I had been living since age 10. That was how I got acquainted with multiple band members through the years.

Meeting drummer Remco Bouwens also lead me to volunteering for Rusty Cage Records, the record label he founded with L.W.S. Inc. and Mac-11 bassist Manfred van Zadelhoff. My tasks were nothing too special – writing and proofreading press releases and biographies, that sort of stuff – but it did allow me to see multiple Defender reunion concerts, with all former band members except original guitarist Jos Baltus involved. Those shows were incredible. Menting’s voice was in great shape, and they played some fantastic material that was written during their original eighties run, though never recorded.

At the time, all members involved with the reunion concerts were recording what was supposed to be a new Defender album with all that previously unreleased material. In fact, a new recording of ‘Labor Liberates’ was one of the bonus tracks on the 2006 Rusty Cage reissue of ‘City ad Mortis’. Recording an album with so many musicians can be quite a challenge logistically, and through the years, my questions about when the album would be done would always be answered with that only one or two musicians still needed to record their parts. Unfortunately, it seems like the new Defender album dissolved along with Rusty Cage Records in 2010.

Fast forward to just a few weeks ago, when I found out that Hammerheart Records was reissuing ‘City ad Mortis’ with three bonus tracks, all three of them songs that were written, but not recorded around the same time. At the moment, I’m not sure how much of those recordings are from those original recording sessions in the mid-2000’s. They surely sound a bit more ballsy and bottom-heavy than the fairly thin-sounding version of ‘Labor Liberates’, but that could of course also be a result of mixing things a little differently.

Each of the three new recordings sounds great. ‘The Lady Vanished’ was their opener at the reunion concerts, if I remember correctly, and it sounds great. Its chorus is exactly as I’ve had it in my head over those twenty years, while compositionally, the track bridges the NWOBHM-leanings of the band’s 1985 demo and the more USPM-esque sound of ‘City ad Mortis’. A live version of the excellent eighties power/prog stomper ‘Moloch’ was released on the 2001 compilation ‘Remaining Tales’, but the slightly slower tempo of this studio version improves its impact. The Maiden-on-steroids sound of ‘Heaven on Your Mind’ is everything an old school metalhead could wish for.

Of course, a full-length Defender album, as it was originally intended, would have been even better. But after all these years of assuming the new recordings of old Defender material would have been lost forever, this reissue of ‘City ad Mortis’ is truly a reason to get excited for me. Especially considering the quality of the material on display here. Even when viewed as a separate release, stripped of all of the history I have with Defender and ‘City ad Mortis’, I strongly recommend this particular release based on its compositional merits. This is how eighties metal should sound, and that is why I love the album so much.

Recommended tracks: ‘City ad Mortis’, ‘Moloch’, ‘The Lady Vanished’