A Hero for the World
s/t

I'm calling their bluff. It doesn't matter how serious they're trying to make this album look by having their own record label and a really nice album cover and everything. In my world this can't be serious, somebody is pulling (both) my legs.

Have you ever seen Dragons Den? Or the American equivalent Shark Tank? The idea is that some poor person comes in to the den (or jumps in to some sort of fictive tank, or whatever it is that the americans have imagined it to be) and meets these rich, haughty bullies that will consider the business ideas that the poor people presents to them and then negotiate for them. Sometimes these really stupid people comes and present their terrible ideas and you just feel so ashamed for them since they themselves obviously don't realise how idiotic they appear. Sometimes they're so stupid you just wonder if they're really honest about it or just act like that to be on television. Well, regardless it's like one of these surprisingly stupid ideas that 'A Hero For The World' feels like.

The first couple of songs are so incredibly bad that I can't see anything but a very short time with me for the album. I'm thinking about bombs, axes, corrosive acids… there's just so many ways to terminate things you don't want on this planet. Maybe a T1000? But then the band present their hidden weapon in Louibeth Aratan on the third song and for a brief, brief moment they give the album some hope that there might be more to it than that shit they've presented so far. Free Forever is still a very poor song but Louibeths voice is a blessing that lasts way too short and then takes way too long to time to return. I have hopes to hear her more in the poor songs that follows, my hope fades a bit as the tracks go by but I still hope. I bare with the album and all the amateurish mistakes in every single song - everything from a really terrible vocalists to the crap production and shitty sound with strange bangs coming every now and then, like explosions or thunder that they've put in the music as if they wanted to emphasize something. The whole thing just sounds so stupid though and I wish A Hero For The World at least could mature to the level of bands like Manowar, Metalium and Rhapsody Of Fire, which is below featus so you know this is really as low as it gets!

Somewhere around track seven or eight is where my hope finally has had enough and takes off as the album just culminates in silliness. The album do gets a bit of vindication in the very end, though as the two very last songs are the two unquestionably best songs on this album. The very last could maybe also qualified to be good if they just hadn't overdone it and sliced it down to half of the 10.13 that it keeps going as this just feels way way way way way way way way way way way way way way way way way way way way way way way way way way way way way way way way way way way way way way way way way way too repetitious! (I hope you get my point? Things DON'T get better just because you repeat the same thing over and over!)

If I were to pin point the biggest reason for this album to feel so bad that it does I would definitely say it's the vocals. The album shouldn't feel this bad, you can hear potential all the way through but they just keep doing stupid, silly misstakes all the time, not to mention lack all sort of personality. Knaasgaard really is a terrible vocalists and sings completely out of both tone and timing. Then he also makes this strange noises all the time too - like he coughs or clears his throat every now and then and when he finally stops doing this he makes something else really odd, which is a kind of grunting sound - like if he couldn't stop from burping but kept on singing and then just left that on the album without doing a retake or anything. The porblem with the music isn't that it's badly played, it's just that it sounds so stereotypical for the genre. I've hear the exact same thing being played from Metalium, Zonata, Sonata Arctica, Stratovarius, Cryonic Temple, The Storyteller, Heavenly, Alkemyst, Dark Moor, Iron Fire, Rhapsody, Insania [Stockholm] and several other mainstream power metal bands. And the worst thing is that this feels like a worse version of their music.

The good things that 'A Hero For The World' have are just completely ruined by the hundreds of more things that isn't good. It sounds stupid, ridicules, silly and tragically bad. And when they're heading for something that could be good it's just trashed and destroyed by all their bad ideas - like in Free Forever, A Quest For The Brave and One Hope For Light. A huge, big praise to Louibeth Aratan for her contributions because she really has this most amazing voice! And she alone rescues this album from a complete failure!

HHHHHHH