Godyva
Alien Heart

Lady Godyva and her men are back with their third instalment called Alien Heart, an album which is said to be mixing powerful guitars and sweet melodies. They are Italians and female fronted, I have always liked female fronted metal so there are always something working in favour of this album. What else? The album cover art doesn’t look too exciting, but alright still and it pretty much shows what the album is all about. It also comes with a lot of grande words about its brilliance and many things like that, so let us instead of reciting a band history that looks as most other band histories.

I think that musically we can describe it as melodic heavy metal with female vocals, quite varied such and the lady sings really well on most parts of the album. “If there's a band who can brilliantly mix powerful guitars with sweet melodies, this band is Godyva” says the press info and it is not completely off because blending power with melodies is what they do. Lady Godiva is described as an enchanter as well and she does sing really well, the question is just if it is enchanting enough to blow us all away. The production is high class and variation over the eleven tracks is fairly large albeit there is some similitude in the middle part of the album. I would say that they do seem to have all the necessary ingredients to create something great, they do not quite mix them together in the best possible way at all times.

I would say that this album has its highs and lows and the lows are in the seventh track Everything is Over, it should have been scrapped already at the idea stage because it is not a good song. Then we have these songs that starts uptempo and pompous to loose it all in the verses and then regain it all in the choruses, such songs are rarely good and then we also have the repetitiveness that some of the songs suffer from. “Now, that is a lot of lows” I hear you think out loud but that doesn’t mean that the album isn’t good. No, the album is overall good with some stuff that is rather brilliant with Apocalypse Fire as one high note, another one is part II of said track that end the album in a grand finale. The title track is another one I like as well as the cover song I Feel You (Ti Sento) which has gotten a rather nice new twist in the Godyva version. This is why I would say that the album is good despite its shortcomings.

I like this album, it has its flaws but it is a good listen if you skip the poor track which can lower your view of the album a bit. So there are some rough edges to file down for these guys but if they do so they will absolutely be up there amongst the best of the female fronted metal bands. In their best moments they are, the best parts of this album is really impressive but it is too bad that not everything is of that level.

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