Danish band Volbeat open their seventh studio album with Last Day Under the Sun, a stadium singalong inspired by a story in Johnny Cash’s autobiography, in which the country icon lays down in a cave and decides to die. “I’ve done it all before, I feel alive again,” sings frontman Michael Poulsen, sparking the suggestion that their seventh studio LP might represent a rebirth. Instead, Rewind, Replay, Rebound plays true to its title, revisiting and refining the four-piece’s traditional blend of chugging melodic metal and high-octane rockabilly abandon.
It’s a sound that’s made them a rock institution in their homeland: last year, they played to 48,000 people in Copenhagen’s Telia Parken, the nation’s biggest ever headline show by a native band. Fist-pumping guitar riots such as Sorry Sack of Bones find them doing little to disrupt the formula that gave them such success, reaching instead for more face-melting guitar solos, huge pop hooks and Metallica-indebted vocal wails.
There are splashes of sax and 1950s piano on the furiously fun Die to Live, while acoustic ballad When We Were Kids showcases their more tender side. It’s hard to argue with their light touch: comical track titles such as Pelvis on Fire tell you all you need to know about how seriously Volbeat take themselves, while the album’s guest list – Slayer guitarist Gary Holt, Clutch vocalist Neil Fallon and the Harlem Gospel Choir – speaks to their eclectic nature. It’s not revolutionary, but Rewind, Replay, Rebound doesn’t sound like Volbeat’s last day under the sun in the slightest.
