Obviously, with hindsight, I look at the review and I cringe a bit at it: it was not especially well written and it's obvious that I was horribly out of my depth with writing it, as I didn't go into any real detail about the album. But, for me, it was an achievement: it showed that I could dip my toe into reviewing and do it to...something resembling a standard. I never took up a proper reviewing job for the site, but I don't think it would be much of an exaggeration that, without that review, I would never have gone on to do this blog which you're reading now.
So, for me to be reviewing the follow up...I kind of feel like a proud father, in a way. It was DragonForce who got me into writing reviews, so I actually feel really happy to be doing this review.
If you want to see my old review of The Power Within, then just click here: I still stand behind most of it now and you might find it really interesting to see what my review writing roots were.
However, I imagine most of you just want to see my review of their most recent album, so let's get started with that!
I'm fairly sure most people know who DragonForce are, but, for the benefit of those who don't, I'll give a quick summery of their career. DragonForce (originally under the name DragonHeart) have their roots in the band Demoniac, a speed black metal band (yes, really) which was around from 1993 to 1999. Their last line up included guitarists Herman Li and Sam Totman, who you should recognise for being the two guitarists of DragonForce, and they decided to form DragonHeart after basically deciding to let Demoniac die. They spent 1999 to 2002 under that name and did a lot of touring under that name before learning that another band were called DragonHeart and changing their name to their most recognisable name. I'm not going to bother covering the rest of DragonForce's history in a lot of detail, but, as a brief summery, they released four albums with ZP Theart on vocals (2003's Valley Of The Damned, 2004's Sonic Firestorm, 2006's Inhuman Rampage and 2008's Ultra Beatdown) before parting ways with him in March 2010, welcomed current vocalist Marc Hudson to the band about a year later, released The Power Within in April 2012 and, still with Hudson in tow, released their second album, Maximum Overdrive.
So, that's DragonForce summed up. But is the album any good? Well, let's see...
First of all, let's look at the cover art. It's...well, too crowded for my liking. It's not necessarily bad, but I think it just packs too much into it. Aside from that, though, it's...well, OK. I thought The Power Within was a bit too simple to be cover art, but this suffers from exactly the opposite problem: it has so much going on that it's hard to really enjoy it. The colour combination is also not especially pleasant for me to look at me: it seems too focused on one colour for me to really enjoy it and the addition of the green just clashes horribly for me. I'd have preferred more varied colours for the artwork, as the final result just doesn't work for me. I'll give credit, there's an interesting idea in it and you could fairly argue that it does succeed in making the point that the song title was going for, but I think the execution lets it down.
So, that's that done. Let's dig into it, shall we?
Well, anyone with a familiarity of DragonForce will automatically be thinking "This is going to be a bunch of overly long songs with high pitched vocals and played fast enough to give you whiplash if you try to headbang along to it"...and I'd say, to an extent, you have a point.
...If you're going "What do you mean, "to an extent"?", you, my good sir (or madam), have clearly missed a development that occurred on The Power Within which has carried over onto this album. See, DragonForce have finally learnt that brevity is not their enemy and the song lengths reflect this: on this album, half of the songs are actually under five minutes long (two of which are under four minutes, if you can believe that) and the longest song on this album ("The Sun Is Dead") comes to just over six and a half minutes long. Which is hardly short for DragonForce standards, but, considering that that was about the average length of their songs on their albums with ZP Theart, that's quite the drop in song length. In fact, the average song length on this album, by my maths, comes to just under five minutes for every song, a feat which even The Power Within couldn't boast (although it IS only over that by a tiny bit).
At the same time, another habit which DragonForce have picked up since the induction of Marc into the band is their habit of not playing everything as if they're trying to be a melodic answer to grindcore. Yes, DragonForce still play their music rather quickly (and this album is a bit of a return to form after The Power Within to DragonForce's older songwriting style), but they have given their music a bit more variety in that they now play their songs at a variety of speeds. Now, in fairness, this isn't necessarily a new development (on their albums with ZP Theart, there was always at least one slower song, such as "Starfire" and "Trail Of Broken Hearts"), but the slower songs now don't feel like another band has hijacked the studio from DragonForce and had their song mistakenly put on the album by a half asleep producer (and, no doubt, a producer at risk from having a heart attack from the sheer amount of caffeine he's had to drink to keep track of everything...yes, I know DragonForce's albums before this one were at least co-produced by Sam Totman and Herman Li (Inhuman Rampage was co-produced by keyboardist Vadim Pruzhanov, Sonic Firestorm, Ultra Beatdown and Twilight Dementia were co-produced by Threshold guitarist Karl Groom and The Power Within was co-produced by bassist Frédéric Leclercq: for reference, this album was solely produced by Jens Borgren), but I rarely get to make jokes about producers, so I might as well make one because of how easy it is to make jokes connected to DragonForrce...and I'm saying this as someone who actually likes DragonForce!): they feel like a natural part of the album!
However, brevity and a better use of speed means nothing if the end result is still crap, and that is really where the first important question has to be raised: does brevity improve DragonForce's music in any way?
Well...for the most part, I have to say that brevity actually does improve DragonForce's music! DragonForce's albums with ZP Theart (especially Inhuman Rampage and Ultra Beatdown) had a habit of having parts of songs which could have been trimmed out of them which, in individual songs, didn't mean much, but added up to a fair bit of time as the album went along. The brevity has helped the band to cut the excess fat out of their songs, with the end result that, while not really streamlining their sound, the excess which hurt them in the past rarely rears its head. The Power Within arguably did better at trimming the excess out of the band's music, as I didn't feel there was any song which succumbed to excess on any level (even "Wings Of Liberty" didn't feel like it was overdoing it to the extent that I became really bothered by it), but I have to say that Maximum Overload only succumbs to excess a few times during the course of the album. That said, part of me feels that there are occasions where I would have actually liked the band to be a bit more over the top, as the band's taming of their sound and conforming to the sound of a typical power metal album (in a manner of speaking: you can still tell it's DragonForce playing, but the album feels less like a DragonForce album and more like a power metal album by DragonForce, if you get what I mean) results in the band not sounding quite as distinctive as they usually do, despite the speed still being there and their usual lyrical range being very much present (believe it or not, DragonForce DO have some deep lyrics in their discography...but that only really comes out in Ultra Beatdown (which is generally considered to be their worst album, from what I've noticed) and The Power Within (which is considered to be one of DragonForce's best albums in some circles, but also sold surprisingly poorly compared to Ultra Beatdown (about 5,800 copies in the first week of release compared to Ultra Beatdown's 24,000)), so you'd actually be forgiven for thinking that DragonForce have no idea how to write serious lyrics!).
As an aside, it is interesting to note that the album was mostly written by Sam Totman and Frédéric Leclercq together (with the only song that Totman has no hand in writing at all being the epic of the album, "The Sun Is Dead", which was exclusively written by Leclercq), but Herman Li (who has co-writer credits on every previous DragonForce album) is nowhere to be seen in the songwriting credits on this album. While this isn't a completely new development (he only contributed lyrics on The Power Within), it does seem more than a bit odd that Li has no contributions to the songwriting on this album and has me wondering whether Li has been shut out of the songwriting for this album deliberately or whether it's just a coincidence that I'm reading too much into. I'm inclined to believe the latter, since Li has only written the music for four DragonForce songs on his own before now (and only one of them had lyrics exclusively written by Li: "The Flame Of Youth" from Inhuman Rampage) and most of his songwriting appearances have been co-writer credits, so it's probably not unreasonable to say that Li isn't a prolific songwriter and he has no contributions on the last two albums simply because he didn't write anything, but I still cannot shake off the feeling that there's something going on behind the scenes which the band are keeping quiet connected to Li...
...And why am I now wearing a tinfoil hat?
Overall, all of the songs do still have a bit of a focus on speed (it wouldn't be DragonForce if their average song didn't seem like most power metal bands' fast songs!), but there are some nice surprises to be found in the album: for a start, "Three Hammers" (despite the first half sounding a bit like it could have been a lost section of "Cry Thunder") breaks into an actual thrash influenced riff! I'm really not kidding there: there is a section of "Three Hammers" that really could have come right out of a thrash metal song! I know some people will be already leaping to point out that "Give Me The Night" from The Power Within started out sounding like a thrash metal song, but this sounds even more like thrash metal than that did. On top of that, you have the first actual cover that the band have made part of the standard tracklist of their albums, Johnny Cash's "Ring Of Fire".
...No, that sentence does not look right to me either. Seriously, you'd have expected Volbeat to have covered that song, not DragonForce! But you know what? Despite my personal dislike of the cover, it's actually rather well done: the band have made it sound like one of their own songs and not gone for the easy route of just replaying the song. While I personally don't like the way they've covered the song (I'll admit, the original is one of my favourite songs), I can at least give them kudos for making it one of their own songs and yet still doing so in a way that allows you to still hear the original in it. Seriously, this is how you should do a metal cover of a song from another genre of music, guys!
...Incidentally, I've just noticed that the two covers that I've highlighted as good songs in the last two album reviews are this one and "Highwayman" as covered by Iced Earth and a few friends (my review for what can be read here)...and both of them originally had Johnny Cash singing on them. Seriously, what is it with metal bands now being unafraid to cover country stuff? I'm not complaining, as the thought of country metal is quite interesting to me (and more than a tad amusing, I'll admit), but country and metal used to be styles of music that just didn't cross over at all! Maybe Volbeat have broken down more barriers than I gave them credit for...erm, sorry, back to the review!
I guess my big underlying rant which I can't quite get out of my system is that this album has all of the hallmarks of a DragonForce album (and a rather good one at that), but, at the same time, it feels like it's become a typical power metal album and doesn't have that little bit of extra fun to really feel like an actual DragonForce album. I know that's a really weird way to put it, but that's ultimately the big issue for me: I know this is a DragonForce album and it sounds like one, but I find that it's lacking something to really make it one...and I really can't place why. The songwriting is arguably the most fresh DragonForce have been for a while (at the very least, every song at least feels like it has fresh ideas in it) and the songs do feel like some of the strongest DragonForce have written for a while, but there's still the overwhelming feeling that something is just missing to turn it into a DragonForce album. I'm seriously at a loss to describe it, not matter how hard I try: I know I should be loving this album, but something just doesn't seem quite right about it.
Ah well, one thing that hasn't changed about DragonForce is that the members still are really good at playing their instruments quickly. I'm going to make a digression RIGHT NOW to snip some comments in the bud because I know someone reading this is bound to be thinking them now that I've said that and I want to make my stance on both points very clear. I know most people will be preparing the old comment that they can only play this quickly because they've needed a huge amount of retakes or have sped up their music...but, frankly, I'm judging the album that I can hear with my ears, not the band as a whole. Also...really, guys? Are you seriously telling me that you're going to hate a band for making multiple takes of something in the studio when the point of a studio album is to get new material recorded to the highest level that the band can to try to recreate in a live environment? EVERY band requires a lot of retakes to nail their music flawlessly: no band, not even one that is well rehearsed in the performance of their own songs, can literally just walk into a studio and flawlessly play through their whole album's material without a pause. It doesn't bother people much with a live performance, but, on a studio recording, you have to get the song perfect because you want to represent your music at its best, so multiple takes is really a necessity even if a band are really good! As for the "speeding up their music" comments...unless you can prove that the band are playing their music a HUGE amount slower than they play live (so, not a difference like ten beats per second or something like that: enough that their songs genuinely do not sound quick any more) AND can prove it without sourcing something from their tour for Inhuman Rampage (since the band admitted that they had a very poor live sound engineer for that tour, and sound issues can cover far more than just affecting the sound the audience hears: in some cases, sound issues can cover THE BAND BEING UNABLE TO HEAR THEMSELVES, which is a huge issue when you're playing music at any speed, let alone the speed DragonForce are usually playing at!), then I'm going to respond by just saying that the band are still playing their music really quickly, so the basic point of playing power metal quickly is still very much intact: just because it's not being played at 200 bpm and is instead being played at 180 bpm doesn't mean it's not still being played quickly! Rather like how catching up to the speed of light works (and yes, I know this doesn't seem to be connected at first glance, but hear me out and give it a think and you should see where I'm coming from), it's not simply a case that every extra beat is something that you expend the same amount of energy to move up to: for every extra beat, you need to expend more and more energy, as you're having to expend energy on top of that which you're already expending to move at the speed you are, which doesn't mean a lot when you're going from 40 to 50, but can be murder if you're going from 180 to 190 (especially on drummers). After you get to a certain point, you simply cannot play any faster because your body physically cannot handle it without either running out of energy and crashing or damaging parts of your body to do it, as, if you try to force too much energy through your muscles, you can break your own bones or even force your muscles off of them (which is not very good for your health). Even if you're one of those people who insists on live performances sounding EXACTLY like studio performances, I think a bit of leeway once you get to the speed DragonForce are playing it is hardly unreasonable!
...Wow, bringing (probably questionable, considering I've not sat in a science class for over five years) science into a discussion about music. That's got to be a first for any critic, let alone for me!
Anyway, the performances on this record are very good. I can't really pick a shining example of a performance on the instrumental front, as all of them are brilliantly performed, but I will say that none of the performances are really that surprising from the band, so nothing on here will really surprise DragonForce fans. Where I do have a bit of a criticism is with Marc Hudson's voice. Now, I loved his voice on The Power Within and his voice is still very good here, but his higher range that isn't connected to his falsetto now has a tone to it which sounds a bit whiny, which makes the higher ranges of stuff like "The Game" sound a bit cringeworthy. I don't want to sound like I hate his voice at all (lord knows, the guy still has a great voice), but I'd suggest the band not try to focus so much on that aspect of his voice in the future, as I felt it damaged some aspects of songs when he had to sing in that part of his voice. There are guest appearances by Matt Heafy of Trivium on three songs, but, I have to be honest, he doesn't really add a lot to the songs he appears on. He is audible on the songs he appears on, which is more than I can say for Hansi on Plagues Of Babylon, but his appearances feel less like he was meant to be part of the album and more like he just happened to be passing through the studio and somehow ended up on the album by accident. Which would be hilarious to imagine on one level (I just can't help chuckling at the thought of Matt Heafy standing somewhat bemused in front of a microphone, with a look on his face that says "How the hell did I get here?"), but is also a bit of a waste of talent on another (yes, you do require music talent to make metalcore of any sort (let alone the thrash influenced take on it that Trivium does), let's stop pretending that metalcore can be made by a half asleep bunch of brain dead morons...unless you're on about Black Veil Brides, in which case, carry on! (insult humour quota: met!)).
The production sounds somewhat like what DragonForce did for The Power Within: loudly mastered, guitar heavy, bass presence that doesn't require you to be able to hear the inaudible...yep, this seems about right! I would have preferred a slightly quieter master, but that's just me.
So, overall, what do I think of this album? Well...I have to be honest, as much as I like this album, I just can't shake off the feeling that it's a bit of a rehash of The Power Within, despite the somewhat fresh songwriting, and that it's lacking something to make me really want to accept this album as a DragonForce album. It's still a great album that is worth seeking out if you like power metal, but I feel like following that up by saying that, if you want to hear DragonForce at their best, you should just pick up The Power Within, as it's the better album with Hudson on vocals. It's more varied, felt fresher than Maximum Overload does and just felt more like a DragonForce album than this does for me. I'm honestly stuck with how to rate this: it's certainly on par with The Power Within on a quality level, but I still think The Power Within is the better album in that it felt like a DragonForce album, which is very impressive when you realise how much variety that album offered, while this feels like DragonForce trying to be DragonForce and not quite nailing it...well, I have to give a rating and, in the end, I see myself listening to The Power Within more than this album, despite feeling they're on the same level as each other, so I have to be harsh and give this a rating that might be lower than I feel it deserves. I don't usually do .5 ratings, but I think I have to break my rule for once, as it's above a 7 for me, but not QUITE good enough for an 8.3, which is what I rated The Power Within on my original review for it and is a rating that I still stand by today (although I would probably have put it as an 8 if I'd done the review here...).
Final Rating: 7.5 Out Of 10
Personal Favourite Tracks: "The Game", "Tomorrow's Kings", "Three Hammers"
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