Highlord - Heir of Power

Highlord is one of those bands you've probably never heard of. And as usual, there's a reason for that. They were formerly known as Avatar, who released one debut album before their great name change, and cropped up during the 1999 summer season of metal, when there was far too many quality 'big name' releases to bother with these relative unknowns. The number of bands coming out of Italy lately is staggering... Dragonhammer, Centurion, Thunderstorm, Languard... Highlord is just another among many and the competition is pretty tough with bands like Skylark, Labyrinth, Rhapsody and Vision Divine leading the pack. Their debut album "Heir of Power" has a very slight glimmer of promise, but its all stuff we have heard before, and done better. The most noticable trait about the album is the shoddy production, it gets the job done, but adds very little to the album itself. It could be said that it gives it a 'raw' feel, but that's not necessarily a good thing. Vocalist, simply known as Vasce' is one of Highlord's only saving graces, if you can call it that. His voice is an "interesting" mixture of Fabio Lione and Timo Kotipelto, which of course points to his foriegn slant in tone, however his voice is mostly boring, whiney and full of hiccups, while he sounds decent on a couple of tunes. Very inconsistant performance. Guitars are forceful and raw, in that sense they are more like Running Wild and Rage, with slightly distorted rough edged gallopy riffs and solos. Unfortunately the sound is quite bad at times, and very messy. Some violin has been thrown in to enhance the package, and it definitely helps in places that would otherwise be completely unbearable. Nothing special here lyrically, take typical words like "kings", "spells", "dreams", "dragons", "warriors"(almost always used with the plural on all accounts) and distribute them throughout each song. That pretty much sums up the basics of their lyrics. Now I know their first language is probably not English, and they do make a decent effort, at least it makes sense most of the time. To make things a little worse, a few of the songs end abruptly lyrically, which leaves you hanging wondering what the purpose of it all was, such as "Bloodwar in Heaven", which ends on a highly unsatisfying note.

"Stone Shaped Minds" is a whirlwind fast paced tune, with the already mentioned gallopy guitar riffs and violin tossed in. It reminds me a tad of Labyrinth at times, and Crystal Eyes as well. Better production, more refined guitar sounds, and a little more violin and keyboards to beef up the background, and this would be a more than just 'decent' track. To put a shadow over the other tunes, I will go ahead and say that its by far the best song on the album. "The Eclipse" is loud, frenzied typical power metal. "Bloodwar In Heaven" opens with a smattering of electric guitar and hollow drum pounding, which swells in volume, and rounds out to be a good start for the song before swirling into this annoying speed and pacing that sounds like Skylark on crack. For everything that goes wrong in this song, the one thing it seems to do correctly is get very irritating in a hurry. The fuzzy, smudging guitar, pathetically wimpy background vocals, screechy lead vocals, and a rhythm section that sounds like random banging being played by a couple of five year olds. I'm not even going to mention the keyboard solo that sounds completely out of place... The emotionally sterile "Burning Desire", does have a nice middle section involving some darting flutish sounding stuff, but then the vocalist hits a few notes that are simply excrutiating and embarrassing to listen to. I actually laughed out loud several times at his attempts at holding it together, but collapsing to pieces in the end vocally.