Sign Of The Hammer

It is a rare thing for me to do repeat listens for an album. When I listen to a record, I'll give it one spin for the day and then move on. If I want to hear it again, it will have to wait until the following day. I was mentioning this the other day to a couple of people and they said that they will quite often listen to a song, and if they really enjoy it, they will immediately go back and play that one song again, and maybe even a third time. My head exploded. I don't understand this concept at all. So it was an unusual situation that I found myself in a few months ago, when I could not get enough of the Sign Of The Hammer album from Manowar.

It had been a long time since I'd listend to Sign Of The Hammer. I couldn't even remember when the last time I'd heard those songs but I was in the mood for some mid-80's American metal, so I queued it up on Spotify. This album hit me like a ton of bricks. The songs sunk their claws in me and did not let go...so much that as soon as the song Guyana was finished at the end of the album, I immediately started it again from the top with All Men Play On Ten. Every song on this album had me amped up and excited...and then surprise, suprise...I gave the album my third spin of the day. I could not get enough and continued to revisit the album daily over the next couple of weeks. In fact I may even rank The Oath as one of my favorite metal songs of all time. It is such an anthem!

After losing my mind over this album, I obviously needed to get my hands on the record. I hit up Discogs and quickly grabbed one from a seller in Germany. This was at the beginning of December. With the postal service being a complete clusterfuck during the holidays, it took nearly three months for the record to arrive in my mailbox. I'd pretty much written it off as a loss by the time we got to February, and as we heading into March I was starting to think that I was going to have to buy another copy. It was such a relief to have it finally arrive.