It doesn’t really matter what you do with it, in fact it doesn’t even really matter much which band is playing it: power metal just sounds like power metal. Which is fantastic for the legion of fanatics the genre has around the world, but for those of us on the fringes, it’s all a little too same-y for its own good.
It doesn’t really matter what you do with it, in fact it doesn’t even really matter much which band is playing it: power metal just sounds like power metal. Which is fantastic for the legion of fanatics the genre has around the world, but for those of us on the fringes, it’s all a little too same-y for its own good.
For the uninitiated, Dragonforce are an English band who play power metal a little faster and a little more over-the-top than most other exponents of the style. Twilight Dementia is their first live album, and is a veritable feast for fans of the band, and of power metal in general. Recorded in Glasgow, it’s a double disc effort featuring 13 lengthy tracks that all sound remarkably similar, unless you’re a massive fan of the band however, in which case you’ll be slavering over this release.
Dragonforce’s ‘point of difference’ is that they play power metal faster than anyone else. And herein lies the problem. Their music sounds exactly like many other power metal bands’ material – just a bit faster. Virtually every track howls along at a million miles an hour, double kicks flying everywhere, with clean melodic vocals and blistering fretwork and keys soaring over the top. They throw in the occasional stop-start dynamic and groove based breakdown (check out Reasons To Live for proof) and a cheesy ballad or two (eg. Starfire, which sounds like Journey or REO Speedwagon) for good measure, and that’s about it in a nutshell. Hate to say it, but to these ears Dragonforce could be Helloween on speed. Hardcore fans will no doubt disagree, and so they should.
What Dragonforce do, they do ridiculously well. It takes skill and endurance to play at such breakneck speeds for so long, and their (many) fans love them dearly for it. If you consider yourself one, you’re likely to fall over yourself rushing out to buy this live album. Others may crave a little more variation in the sound however, although then it probably wouldn’t be ‘true’ power metal. Oh, it’s such a quandary isn’t it?
Yet, from the ‘universally objective’ point, this whole ‘being a music fan’ thing is not quite as complicated as we sometimes seem to make it. If you dig – you dig it. If you don’t, go listen to something else. Pretty simple really…
