Album review – ASTRALION – Astralion
Limb Music (Release date 14.11.14)
I do like a bit of melodic power metal, all stirring melodies and glorious harmonies set to a furious backbeat, played well there is little better. Astralion hail from Finland and manage to tick all the boxes on this, their debut album. The band have a wealth of experience from playing in several different bands before forming Astralion and it shows, the music is well written, well played and very tight.
Opening track ‘Mysterious & Victorious’ sets the stall out well with stunning guitar work, furious riffing, thunderous drums and soaring keyboards. Ian Highhill takes care of vocal duties and if I have to pick on a weak point then it would be that he sounds flat on occasions but for the most part he does a good job.
On tracks like ‘At The Edge Of The World’ and ‘When Death Comes Knocking’ there is little to fault, it may be generic power metal but it is bloody good! The lead song on the album and future band anthem is the majestic ‘We All Made Metal’ which has a fist pumping chorus that will go down a storm live. To be a true power metal album there must be a power ballad and the guys don’t disappoint here with the soaring track ‘To Isolde’, you can almost see the lighters in the air as the track plays.
‘Mary (Bloody)’ quickens the pace once again with lyrics which rhyme ‘Mary’ with ‘scary’ in the chorus, top stuff! The album closes with the longest track, the epic ‘Last Man On Deck’ which starts off slowly before all hell breaks loose once more in a hail of furious fretwork and keyboard wizardry.
Astralion have produced an excellent debut album here that any lover of power metal should have in their collection. The band’s motto is ‘Forget the dragon, forget the sword, here’s true power from the chord’, couldn’t have put it better myself.
****
Review by David Wilson
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Power Plays w/c 11 November 2024
ARCANE MOON Hello Sun (indie)
S8NT ELEKTRIC XTC (Long Branch Records)
RIOGHAN Hands (Inverse Records)
ARCANA KINGS Here We Go (Curtain Call Records)
KLOGR face The Unknown (Zeta Factory)
BEYOND UNBROKEN Dance With The Dead (FiXT)
REVENGIN Decadent Feeling (Wormholedeath)
Featured Albums w/c 11 November 2024
09:00-12:00 The Best of 2003-2023 (Melodic Rock)
12:00-13:00 The Best of 2003-2023 (Melodic Hard Rock)
14:00-16:00 The Best of 2003-2023 (Singer Songwriter)
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