{"id":29868,"date":"2026-08-28T18:25:54","date_gmt":"2026-08-28T18:25:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/alliedforces.eu\/?p=29868"},"modified":"2026-09-03T18:51:37","modified_gmt":"2026-09-03T18:51:37","slug":"loudness-metal-mad-still-mad-after-all-these-years","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/alliedforces.eu\/en\/loudness-metal-mad-still-mad-after-all-these-years\/","title":{"rendered":"Loudness: Metal Mad – still mad after all these years!"},"content":{"rendered":"

There is something wonderfully Japanese about the way Loudness<\/strong> have approached their career. Not because they were the first Japanese metal band to look towards the West, nor because they eventually became one of the few groups from their country capable of breaking through internationally, but because they have always seemed remarkably uninterested in behaving like a band that had already achieved everything. After releasing Thunder In The East<\/em>, Lightning Strikes<\/em> and Hurricane Eyes<\/em>, conquering audiences far beyond Japan and becoming one of the country’s greatest heavy-metal exports, they could have spent the rest of their existence playing Crazy Nights<\/strong> and Crazy Nights<\/strong> alone, collecting the applause and allowing the years to do the rest. Instead, Loudness<\/strong> spent much of the nineties changing direction, experimenting with alternative metal, groove, industrial sounds and electronics, before bringing the classic line-up back together and continuing to record at an almost absurd rate. By the time Metal Mad<\/em> appeared on February 20, 2008, it was already their twenty-first studio album. And perhaps the most remarkable thing about it is that they still sounded like a band trying to find out what they could get away with.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That is an important detail because Metal Mad<\/em> is one of those albums that becomes considerably more interesting once we stop expecting it to be something it never intended to be. If you approach it looking for another Disillusion<\/em> or Thunder In The East<\/em>, you are probably going to walk away disappointed. The production is heavier, the guitars are frequently down-tuned, the rhythm section has a much more modern character and there are moments when the influence of the nineties and early 2000s is impossible to ignore. Yet this was not a young band desperately trying to sound contemporary. It was Minoru Niihara<\/strong>, Akira Takasaki<\/strong>, Masayoshi Yamashita<\/strong> and Munetaka Higuchi<\/strong> \u2014 the classic line-up that had already reunited at the beginning of the decade \u2014 taking everything they had learned during more than twenty-five years of existence and throwing it into another record. The result is uneven, occasionally strange and sometimes gloriously excessive, but there is something admirable about a band of this age refusing to turn itself into a museum exhibit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The album begins with Fire Of Spirit<\/strong>, an instrumental that immediately puts Munetaka Higuchi<\/strong> in the spotlight. There is no elaborate introduction, no attempt to disguise what is coming and certainly no nostalgic recreation of the eighties: just a massive guitar riff, an enormous rhythm section and Akira Takasaki<\/strong> doing what Akira Takasaki<\/strong> has always done best. It is an unusually appropriate opening because it establishes the physical weight of the record before Metal Mad<\/strong> arrives and delivers the closest thing the album has to a traditional anthem. The title track is fast, direct and almost ridiculously easy to remember, built around the kind of chorus that seems to have been engineered for thousands of fists in the air. \u00abForever, carry on\u00bb is hardly subtle, but subtlety was never really the point. After all these years, Loudness<\/strong> were still making music about the spirit of heavy metal refusing to die, and there is something almost charmingly stubborn about that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

More importantly, Metal Mad<\/strong> demonstrates that Takasaki<\/strong> had lost none of the qualities that made him such an important guitarist during the band’s golden years. His playing is not simply a matter of technical ability \u2014 although there is plenty of that \u2014 but of knowing when a melody needs to be memorable and when a solo needs to sound completely unhinged. The song’s central riff is almost ridiculously straightforward compared with some of the stranger material that follows, but that simplicity gives the guitar work somewhere to explode from. It is probably the one moment on the album where the old Loudness<\/strong> are completely visible without needing to look through a layer of modern production, and perhaps that is why it remains the song most people will remember when the final notes of Metal Mad<\/em> disappear.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then High Flyer<\/strong> changes the atmosphere completely. The song is heavy, slow and strangely hypnotic, with Takasaki<\/strong> bringing back some of the exotic and Eastern-flavoured melodic ideas that had been part of his vocabulary for years. It is not difficult to hear the guitarist’s fascination with sounds beyond conventional Western heavy metal, but the composition itself is considerably darker than the band’s classic material. Spellbound #9<\/strong> pushes the modern side even further, combining an aggressive riff with processed vocals and an almost alternative-metal sensibility that would have been completely unthinkable during the Thunder In The East<\/em> period. This is one of those moments when Metal Mad<\/em> makes it perfectly clear that the classic reunion had never been intended as a musical time machine. Loudness<\/strong> had reunited with the same musicians, but they had not become the same musicians they had been twenty years earlier.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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