Anvil - Pounding The Pavement album review

Canada’s metal survivors keep their cylinders fired up

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Cover art for Anvil - Pounding The Pavement album

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Still a metal force, these Canadian veterans have been enjoying a musical rebirth over the last few years and Pounding The Pavement continues this process, offering a mix of massive riffs, anthemic choruses, tight musicality and gruffly charismatic vocals from Lips. It begins with the mid-tempo march of Bitch In The Box and builds from there. Every song has menace, teetering on the brink of going berserk, but kept under control. The title track and Smash Your Face are typical of this approach. Meantime, Rock That Shit and Black Smoke are the closest the band get to speed metal, and Nanook Of The North clunks with it doom-laden pacing. But the band percolate best when hammering down in terrain that’s reminiscent of Motörhead circa Orgasmatron. Nothing here quite compares to the Anvil classics. But this album shows they’re more than a nostalgia trip.

Malcolm Dome
Malcolm Dome

Malcolm Dome had an illustrious and celebrated career which stretched back to working for Record Mirror magazine in the late 70s and Metal Fury in the early 80s before joining Kerrang! at its launch in 1981. His first book, Encyclopedia Metallica, published in 1981, may have been the inspiration for the name of a certain band formed that same year. Dome is also credited with inventing the term "thrash metal" while writing about the Anthrax song Metal Thrashing Mad in 1984. With the launch of Classic Rock magazine in 1998 he became involved with that title, sister magazine Metal Hammer, and was a contributor to Prog magazine since its inception in 2009. He died in 2021.