Heavenly - Virus

The ghastly apparition that you see over on the left there is the cover of Heavenly's recently released album Virus, which I had no idea existed until a few days ago. It looks like a bit of an image change for them, in more ways than one - the new rotationally-symmetrical H/Y logo complete with the Warcraft-Knightmare hybrid font means that they are continuing their remarkable achievement of never keeping the same logo over any consecutive albums.

What I find most interesting about them is that they were a very mediocre band for the first couple of albums, having a feeling close to Gamma Ray about them complete with a vocalist who was trying to sound like Kai Hansen and just sounded like nails on a blackboard. Then, after a two-year break, they came out of nowhere again and released what I think is the best album in my collection, Dust to Dust. With a storyline which is essentially about hunting vampires, the song list is mostly made up of seven-minute and above epics. It manages to sound like Dream Theater without the pretentious bits, keeping an epic operatic sound all the way through to the Castlevania-inspired finish. It even has a power metal ballad that isn't actually terrible.

Of course, they won't appeal to everyone - the most obvious problem being their almost comical disregard for emphasis, syllabary or any kind of pronounciation. According to Piet Sielck, the reason most European bands write in English rather than their own is because the number of different ways to phrase sentences in English is very high, and you can get away with stretching the syllables a lot more than you can in languages like German or Spanish - but this really is pushing it a bit. As an example, take this sample from the beginning of "Keepers of the Earth". The lyrics are under the cut if you're unable to decipher them.

( The Cut )

As you can probably guess I'm rather excited about this next release, but I've looked on Amazon and strangely it seems that America gets the Japanese import version but not the European one...