Reviews
2007-09-25
Dragonscale are a young Polish band that creates here what might be described as Viking power metal. It's certainly melodic and quite well-played, but the fact the budget for this self-produced album would probably be barely enough to buy you a bottle of beer is quite evident in this.
After the usual intro, the band kicks in with Dragons From The Black Forest. Riff-wise it's pretty solid, I have no complaints about the playing abilities of the two guitarists in the band, some classic power metal influences are in there, somewhere between German and Italian power metal, and they make it work.
The vocals are a bit harder to describe, high-pitched and pretty energetic, they still suffer a bit from lack of experience. You can hear the guy has a good voice with a decent range, but he still doesn’t use it perfectly. If the band had a good producer and better sound, it would’ve been much better, but it's still not bad.
Musically it fits together nicely, songs such as Holy Land and Warriors Of The North prove that the band's heart is in the right place – it's melodic, quite well played, and benefits from a youthful enthusiasm some of the veteran bands sadly lost.
I would urge these guys to get someone to help them with their English, as the lyrics and song titles suffer from some seriously bad grammar, but again – it doesn’t hurt the thing too much, its still a self-produced effort by a young band, and should be judged as such. In any case, I salute the guys here for putting the effort into making a decent metal album, well-played and energetic, let's just hope they get signed and get some money to make it sound better too.
Alon Miasnikov
