“Twilight Force’s Dawn of the Dragonstar should have been on my 2019 year-end list. Hell, I should have at least written a Things You Might Have Missed piece on it. Yet in retrospect, at the time, the prospect of fully embracing Twilight Force was borderline embarrassing, even for me.” Return of the GammaStrataWeenie.
“Even though I have pigeonholed myself as the album art guy around here, when I’m selecting promos, I actually don’t often select an album based on the art. I usually go by one of three methods: completely blind (either random or letting a colleague select), selecting straight from the list (where the only information I have is artist, title, genre and label), or cherry picking (where I listen to singles until I find something I think I’ll like). Trick or Treat is an exception, because just look at this goofy-ass cartoon cover! Either this will be stupid enough to work, like Nanowar of Steel, or it’ll be too stupid to work, like most power metal. So which one is it?” Symphonies of slickness.
“If you’re a fan of Narnia or DivineFire, you’ll get a warm, fuzzy feeling when you listen to Flames of Fire. These guys play power metal with chunky guitars and big choruses showcasing the gritty, yet beautiful Dio-esque vocals of Liljegren, and it’s a sound that I fell head-over-heels for on DivineFire’s 2006 album Into a New Dimension—still one of the heaviest power metal albums I’ve ever heard to this day. But where DivineFire displayed obvious overlap with Stefanović’s extreme metal background, Andersson’s compositions for Flames of Fire stay closer to standard heavy/power metal fare.” Are there other kinds of flames?
“I’d like to start this review with an apology to Eldritch Elitist. I violated his rights by covering Skeletoon’s 2020 album, Nemesis. In Steel Druhm‘s excitement to assign me a goofy album from a goofy band with a goofy name, and in my excitement to receive such an honor, we both failed to realize that Eldritch had covered Skeletoon’s Goonies-themed album They Never Say Die in 2019, giving him the right of prima promo. The gracious Mr. Elitist gently broke the news to me shortly after that review published, and even went so far as to allow me to cover this, Skeletoon’s fifth album in six years. The Nerd Metal Superheroes are headed back into classic film territory, this time tackling the Back to the Future trilogy.” Yucks Capacitor.
“What a profoundly odd band In Tormentata Quiete is. Plenty of Italian bands are grand, pompous, cheesy, and theatrical, but few do it like this one, sporting three vocalists in a range of styles but remaining light on orchestral elements. Their first foray into the halls of AMG was shot down with a 1.0 from Grymm for being unstructured and containing baffling, out-of-place elements like rap breakdowns in the middle of their semi-symphonic avant-garde drama metal. Their second, Finestatico, earned them a 3.5 from yours truly, seemingly fixing everything its predecessor did wrong. Krononota sees another change of the guard in the vocal department, but can they maintain the high standard of before?” Pomp in a weird place.
“I didn’t have a choice about this one. Regular readers will recall my central role in the Skelator Incident, so it should come as no surprise that Steel Druhm took one look at band called “Skeletoon” and their self-proclaimed “nerd metal” and immediately assigned it to me. He announced his excitement for me to review these goofy guys on one of our AMG Staff Zoom chats, and since it went so well last time he did that, I was more than a little apprehensive.” The Toonies.
“If you build it, they will come. Oh wait. That’s Field of Dreams. Either way, that was really the intent that Season of Dreams founder Jean-Michel Volz had for his new project. The Frenchman wanted to take his compositional experience and use it to form a band that channeled the greatest aspects from both heavy and power metals.” Bombed shelter.
“France’s Fairyland last released an album in 2009 and were already seasoned at that point, with a decade of releases under their belt. 2020 brings with it a release called Osyrhianta, a bombastic, symphonic power metal record. What does 11 years of development bring to the table?” Time and Tolkien.
“Having never heard of Magic Kingdom prior to this review, I was surprised to find out that the band’s existence dates back to 1998 and to find out that Mr. Lance King himself had at one point been involved with the band according to Metal Archives. MetAlmighty finds the band slinging power metal tunes that should satisfy fans of bands like Theocracy, Gloryhammer, and the various incarnations of Rhapsody.” Magic, monsters, and monarchs.
On the road to finishing my dissertation, there will be many bumps. Today’s bump? I’m writing the Record(s) o’ the Month for July which robs me of time for completing my real goal. My real goal right now is to pump out 2,500 words a day of lifeless academic text that will suck the joy out of a fascinating topic for readers so that the ancient Blood God Academius, whose grotesque form lives solely upon the sacrificed blood, sweat, tears and writers guilt innocent and naïve graduate students, can be sated.
