Customer Reviews

Danger

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Sweden's Power Metal phenoms have released a very solid follow-up to their auspicious debut album, with their second studio release simply entitled, "Danger". With "Danger", Supreme Majesty has managed to build upon the success of Tales of a Tragic Kingdom, one of the best Melodic Power Metal band debuts I have had the pleasure to hear.

"Danger" features nine tracks totaling around forty-three minutes. Two of the songs, "Until the End of Time" & "By Your Side", are ballads with the remaining numbers being medium to high speed melodic metal, somewhat reminiscent of the hair metal of the eighties. The band's sound is augmented with some strings and two wonderful ladies with backing vocals.

If you like any of the Epic Power Metal stalwarts such as Sonata Arctica, Kamelot, Rhapsody or Helloween, this should be right up your alley.

There must be something in the water in Scandinavia. Or the ice, more to the point. But the region keeps churning out quality hard rock acts in the way that the US didn't for much of the 90's.

Releases that may be akin to this mob would be Kamelot, and even Jeff Scott Soto's Lost in Translation has musical similarities for my mind.

But onto the release itself. Supreme Majesty is not going to rewrite metal history BUT they have put out a polished metal album with some what interesting cover art and nicely played tunes. This is full bodied release - ie the singer, Joakim Olssen doesn't rule the roost and nor do endless widdly diddly neo classical axe solos. What we don't get are detuned guitars or guttural vocals and we DO get some uplifting lyrics with nice use of keyboards on some tracks.

The main downsides would be a slightly annoying drum sound on a couple of tracks - at least for headphone listening - and also the English as a 2nd language in terms of the way the singer gets his voice around the material. Unless that's just how the dude sounds....

Overall these are minor gripes. If your a fan of melodic metal and like a bit of power metal but DON'T want to get hammered by relentless guitar solos or falsetto voices then this is a very worthwhile purchase. A band that's certainly worth watching in the future on the strength of this release.

Oh, and dig the vocal warbling at the start of title track - I thought Joey Tempest had stepped into the studio for a couple of seconds..... :)