Excalion - Waterlines

Rendered covers always look awkward and Poser-y to me - I'm now in a position to say it's no exaggeration that I've released albums with better cover artwork than this.

If there's one word that I really hate being used to describe any music, it's "commercial". I remember Joachim Cans apologetically saying in a commentary on one of his solo albums that this particular track (which I liked a lot) was one of the most "commercial" on the album as if this was a deadly sin, and it's not a new accusation - it was a complaint levelled at Iron Maiden's Can I Play With Madness all the way back in the 80s. If something's a bit happier than normal and likely to appeal to people, then this seems to be viewed as a crime against the metal community.

The word has also been applied to this band, but admittedly, I can sort of see why the accusation is made because they're one of the most accessible new bands that I think I've heard in a while. There are none of the genre's more off-putting elements here - there is a complete lack of eighteen-minute epics about the emerald sword of the cybernetic angels, and indeed it's strange to see a track list where the majority of songs are around the four minute mark (with the only exception being the questionably-titled Soaking Ground at the end which is a bit more ambitious at six and a half). The songs don't really break away from a standard ABABCB structure and concentrate on a couple of motifs and melodies each, never getting particularly heavy at all and staying around the early Stratovarius/Sonata Arctica territory.

The album opens with this, which literally screams "this is a power metal video" from the very start, but then it immediately settles into something catchy and upbeat (and the video calms down as well in a worse way - it's just four minutes of them all performing unenthusiastically against a 3D Studio MAX background and can safely be ignored).

The man with the unfeasibly large mouth there is Jarmo Pääkkönen, a vocalist with the almost unique distinction of not having been in anything else before, but he quickly shows off that he's fluent in gibberish like the best of the genre's singers. He sounds, as you might expect, rather like a fusion of Timo Kotipelto and Tony Kakko.

Musically they sound like a decent stand-in for Stratovarius (when they were good), but seem to suffer from the same indescribable problem as them as well for me - most of the songs have good, memorable tunes and there are some outstanding high-energy choruses, but somehow, everything feels a bit... bland, as if it's not quite as amazing as it really could be. Perhaps because it's aimed at being too commercial. Damn it.