Tuesday, January 20: Gamma Ray, "18 Years"
“18 Years” was about five and a half minutes long but felt just as epic as Gamma Ray’s longer tracks due to the combination of Ralf Scheepers’ vocals ebbing and flowing and the moodiness building to a massive crescendo. Scheepers took the lead in writing the track with assistance from Dirk Schlächter and there was clearly something personal in his lyrics and singing, but Thomas Nack’s drums were an anvil to the skull and the production was just as coked out as the rest of Insanity and Genius so if Ralf was aiming for something along the lines of “Father and Son” (the previous Schlächter/Scheepers collaboration) the intimacy of the message got lost in the attack of the recording. Nonetheless, the track still found Scheepers and Gamma Ray at the relative peak of their power as a unit, and there was a compelling force to the way this lineup approached the songs even if it could be smothering at points.
