Scanner (3) – The Cosmic Race

Fresh, spectacular material from Scanner!

Released in 2024, THE COSMIC RACE is the seventh full-length studio album by ’s Scanner, who’ve been releasing albums since their stellar debut HYPERTRACE in 1988. They’re upbeat power/speed metal with a futuristic/space schtick, somewhat similar to Helloween musically, but they definitely have their own vibe.

Guitarist Axel Julius is the mastermind and so the band is basically Axel and whoever hires-on. That said, singer Efthimios Ioannidis has been with the group for 21 years as of this writing, which is more than just a “hire on.” He’s also arguably the best, most versatile vocalist of the five singers in the group’s history. Only Leszek Szpigiel (aka The Naked Duke or Haridon Lee) has sang on two Scanner albums (in the mid-90s), like Efthimios Ioannidis.

I’ve heard practically all of Scanner’s albums at one point or another, but I’m only intimately familiar with the aforementioned debut and 2002’s SCANTROPOLIS, which infamously featured female vocalist Lisa Croft and is written off by some fans as a more commercially viable experiment. I defend SCANTROPOLIS because Axel & crew needed to do something different at that juncture and it worked for me. Lisa was gone the next year, replaced by Efthimios Ioannidis and here we are with his second effort with the group.

Simply put, THE COSMIC RACE is a stunning modern release by Scanner. Axel is 61 as of this writing and none of the other are exactly spring chickens, except maybe for the new second guitarist Dominik Rothe, who’s relatively younger. In any case, it’s great that a band with such a long history is putting out their best stuff now and not just resting on their laurels.

This opus is cut from the same cloth as HYPERTRACE, in contrast to the experimentation of SCANTROPOLIS, yet it’s not as one-dimensional. For instance, the dynamic opener, “The Earth Song,” features a catchy mid-eastern styled chant during the break in the second half while “Warriors of the Light” is traditional Scanner, but with a quasi-pirate bit near the end. Meanwhile “Dance of the Dead” has an ultra-heavy doom metal main riff, but with melodic verses and an epic chorus. Songs like “Farewell to the Sun” and closer “The Last and First in Line” feature the expected hooky anthemic choruses whereas “A New Horizon” slows things down for a non-commercial ‘ballad.’

This is just a taste. The whole album’s solid new material from beginning to end.

The nine tracks clock-in at 47.42 minutes.

GRADE: A