Force Majeure
The Rise of Starlit Fires

This Finnish album was released some time ago, but it is just now that I have finished the work of reviewing it and placed the opinion in print. This is the third album by the band Force Majeure and it looks like a power metal album, the logo and the titles do nothing to dissuade that association. And as this has been around for a while it has been reviewed in both very positive and quite negative ways as far as I saw with a quite search on the interweb and the Hallowed review goes in the more negative direction as these Finns don’t really offer anything particularly exciting.

Quite classic power metal of the slightly rawer type with catchy songs, raspy vocalist and a pretty typical selection of songs. The production is fairly typical of the genre and it would be fair to conclude that it can’t be described as anything original or imaginative. I would claim that it is a fairly typical album in most regards, the singer is like a better version of Marko Hietala and they have some energy. Otherwise we get the fairly typical selection of songs taking 45 minutes to play through, it feels a tad on the longer side to me.

Not the most impressive album I have ever heard, pretty far from it actually. And it is not the most exciting album either and there are many similar albums done much better. Fans of power metal in general might like it, it presses the correct buttons for them but it isn’t a particularly exciting album from a more general point of view. And as a critic you have to compare with the rest of the similar music that exist and in comparison with that I don’t think this album has anything particularly exciting to offer.

Perhaps this is an album that should be looked at by fans of the power metal genre, I think it could be appealing. At the same time I feel quite comfortable claiming that there are much better choices and to recommend that you look at something else before looking at this album. The Rise of Starlit Fires isn’t exactly a sparkling album.

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