Some records don’t need explaining. They don’t arrive with a manifesto or a press release full of buzzwords. They just kick the door in, throw the horns up and demand you remember why you fell in love with heavy metal in the first place. “Midnight Blitz” is one of those records.
April 2023. Warbringer are in the home of metal – the city where it was literally invented, and which I live just outside – and Tailgunner were opening on a three-band bill.
That night, I wrote this: theirs is a twin-guitar, fists-in-the-air, party-like-it’s-1980-and-Maiden-are-ruling-the-world type of attack.
Turns out I wasn’t wrong. If anything, I undersold it.
The title track – and it could just as easily apply to the album as a whole – “Midnight Blitz” sounds the alarms. Gather the bugles. Over the top we go, boys. HEAVY. BLINKING. METAL. Everything you could possibly want, delivered with absolute conviction.
“Tears In Rain” drops the pace but not the quality. It rules, plain and simple, and I genuinely don’t care that I’ve heard shades of it before. When something’s this well executed, familiarity becomes comfort rather than criticism.
Ready for a gallop? Of course you are. So are they. “Follow Me In Death” takes on all comers, Eddie Mariotti’s drums pounding like artillery fire while that twin-guitar attack rides straight through the middle of your chest.
For a relatively young band, Tailgunner are supremely good at this. There’s no mystery why KK Downing is behind the desk here – he clearly recognises the talent in “Dead After Dark” and the quite brilliant “Barren Lands And Seas Of Red”, which stands as the album’s emotional and musical centrepiece.
Side two – and with something this unapologetically old-school I can’t help but think in vinyl terms – opens with a shift in gears as “War In Heaven” brings in synths and stretches out into an epic, arms-wide ballad.
“Blood Sacrifice” then trims the fat and thunders past in 200 glorious seconds, while power metal bands the world over would happily kill for “Night Raids”. Honestly, they’d kill for any of these songs.
What really seals it, though, is how authentic this all feels. This isn’t a band cosplaying in a denim jacket picked up from Asda. This is the real deal – lived-in, believed-in, and played like their lives depend on it.
“Eulogy” – and the only surprise is that it exists at all, because the best albums always had nine tracks – soars. Seemingly just for fun, it feels like a more restrained DragonForce, complete with a little outro that lets the credits roll in style.
Sometimes you see a band and you just know. Not always – I once saw Muse open for Feeder in the late ’90s and confidently declared they were “shit” and “would never be seen again” (and I maintain I was half correct). But I was right about Tailgunner.
There will be people who are po-faced about this. That ignores two simple truths:
- Tailgunner aren’t pretending to be avant-garde, and
- the first wave of metal bands aren’t going to be around forever, no matter how immortal you think the Metal Gods are.
So forget all that nonsense and just revel in it. Because “Midnight Blitz” isn’t irony, nostalgia, or cosplay – it’s a quite brilliant heavy metal record.
Rating: 9.5/10
