#aenid

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Original: “Laocoön and His Sons” [Unknown sculptor] (c.42 to 20 BCE)

"Something pretending to be human"

Manilla Road: Gates of Fire (2005)

With a premise right out of Spinal Tap, Manilla Road’s fourteenth studio LP, Gates of Fire, arrived in 2005 armed with nine songs partitioned into three separate castle metal suites amounting to ... wait for it ... a trilogy of trilogies!

Quick, somebody get me a calculator -- and a Dungeon Master’s Guide.

All kidding aside, this sort of thing (albeit not always on such a grand scale), had been part and parcel for the Wichita, Kansas group since their genesis in the late 1970s, and that’s why many of us nerds consider Manilla Road to be the greatest treasure in American underground metal.

Here, band leader, singer, and guitarist Mark ‘The Shark’ Shelton is backed up by drummer Cory ‘Hardcore’ Christner, bassist Harvey ‘The Crow’ Patrick and -- in a break with Manilla Road’s power trio legacy -- a second lead vocalist in Bryan ‘Hellroadie’ Patrick, whose nickname IS his origin story.

Now, to most long-time Manilla Road fans, Hellroadie’s guttural grunts and piercing screams felt both unnecessary and unwelcome, but we simply assumed he was there to give the aging Shelton (who would sadly pass of a heart attack in 2018) a much-needed break, on-stage more so than on record.

In any case, time to saddle up our steeds and gallop into high-fantasy and adventure, via the pounding “Riddle of Steel” (which may sound like a Manowar title, but that would be “high comedy”) and the album’s first trilogy, based on the Conan the Barbarian short story The Frost Giant’s Daughter.

This is followed by the acoustic “Behind the Veil” and a repetitive head-banger called “When Giants Fall,” which actually dares cannibalize Manilla Road’s 1983 classic, “Flaming Metal Systems,” but at least ‘Hellroadie’ is nowhere to be found -- back to humping gear, perhaps? 

Trilogy number two, sub-titled Out of the Ashes, is devoted to Virgil's epic poem, The Aeneid (!), and it immediately raises the conceptual bar with an assortment of musical and lyrical themes, seemingly born of untold hours of rehearsal room jams and Shelton’s face-melting guitar shredding.

These themes successfully bind the unprecedented, fifteen-minute “The Fall of Iliam,” to the eleven-minute “Rome” by way of a barely more concise (just six minutes) riff-monger, “Imperious Rise,” making this impressive, half-hour-long triptych a virtual mini-album within the album.

Finally, along comes the third, eponymous trilogy, inspired by the heroic stand of King Leonidas and 300 Spartan warriors at the Battle of Thermopylae and -- before you go consult Wikipedia, I’ll confirm that, yes, this preceded the blockbuster, special effects-laden movie by a couple of years.

Manilla Road’s interpretation begins with the foreboding, militaristic advance of “Stand of the Spartans,” proceeds through the bolero-paced “Betrayal” (describing the Persian reprisal), and culminates in the moving part-acoustic/part-electric marche funèbre of “Epitaph to the King.”

At ten, additional minutes of guitar heaven/overkill (depends on who you ask), the latter may seem a little much to the uninitiated, but not to loyal supporters familiar with Shelton’s six-string prowess, for whom it sounds as much like a career highlight as a premature requiem.

Certainly, it delivers an epic and majestic finale, worthy of an ambitious undertaking like Gates of Fire, and (I’ll say it again) probably the most important underground heavy metal band America has ever produced. 

p.s. -- Some of these words evolved from my All-Music Guide review of Manilla Roads’s Gates of Fire.