Holy Dragons
Civilizator

Kazak dragons are once again adding a new title to their already extensive discography, and this time it is better than ever before – probably for the fourteenth time in the career spanning about twenty-odd years. I have reviewed them before, it was their 2012 effort Zerstörer and I cannot really claim to be that impressed by that particular album, I have not heard anything more than that album from them before this one, I either just glossed over or missed their latest effort from 2014 but judging from the data I have now gathered I doubt I missed much with that album. So what about this new album then?

Musically we are treated to something we have heard before, fairly typical heavy/power metal of the kind they have already written many songs in. The fact is that there is no real sense of novelty when listening to this album, the vocalist almost sounds like a certain Bruce and the riffs and compositions could have been borrowed from many albums that was released many years ago. The production is decent but not amongst the best I have heard within this genre during the last couple of years. And the album is long, over an hour long and many of the songs feels lengthened with empty stuff and the fact that the album feels like it should have been a maximum of maybe 40 minutes doesn’t really help its case.

I think we can conclude that it is a generic heavy metal album that is quite long as well, not really a recipe for success amongst the serious critics who would see this as a rather tired sounding generic heavy metal with zero imagination. You either create something with a sensation of novelty or something absolutely brilliant if you want to make something relevant, cloning yourself or copying what anyone else is doing isn’t really a way to make yourself very exciting. Of course there are fans who like when everything sounds the same and those are probably who this band is targeting and that group will most likely find this pretty agreeable – an opinion I base on reviews I have found on the interweb for this album. So if you are one of those who still think Iron Maiden is a relevant band and like your heavy metal as it has always sounded, this is clearly for you.

I think this album just points towards the problem with the music business today, there are just too many bands/artists fighting for small crumbs and unfortunately that hurts everyone – especially us fans who are looking for those very few gems that appear once in a while, they are really hard to find amongst the background noise. This was really an album I could have glossed over but as I had already prepared for a review I could not just skip it as it would be work for nothing, and the conclusion is that it is for the heavy metal fans, hardcore heavy metal fans.

HHHHHHH