Melodic power metal and nothing else here, don’t expect to re-discover the genre, or if you never like it, well this album will just give you another reason to keep hating it, but putting all those assumptions aside, good solid mellow power here.
The first thing that jumps out is Magnus Eriksson and his very melodic, very hard rock voice; his really good, and his distinctive tone helps Axenstar develop a “unique” sound among the many power metal bands that overpopulate Sweden.
The whole album is catchy, some may say many songs follow the same formula as the billions of other power metal bands in the world, but hey if it will be that simple to create good music then all the untalented bastards that write reviews will be musicians (shit, I’m one of those!), my point is that yes maybe they do sound from time to time like some other power band, but the point is that if they did rip someone off, they picked the right riff to steal because the album is great and every song is catchy and fast, with the exception of the ballad Northern Sky, it just bores the crap out of me.
The guitars are perfect, besides the fact that there are not a lot of solo segments (I actually really like that, very tired of long pretentious guitar solos in melodic power metal) they may not be as hard as they were in the debut album Perpetual Twilight, but they fit perfectly with all the keyboard segments; the drums never stop pounding, making every song a “let’s slay the dragon” kind of ride.
Some extremely catchy tracks are Blind Leading the Blind, Don't Hide Your Eyes and Children Forlorn this last one been probably my favorite of the album.
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