Royal Hunt - Show Me How To Live (2011)

Royal Hunt - Show Me How To Live

Doing progressive power successfully has got to be one of the greatest feats in melodic metal. Either one of the genres is not being nearly represented enough in the mix, so the title is misleading, or they're merged in such a way that both the uplifting harmonies of power metal and alien qualities of prog metal get left out of the equation, leaving us with a boring, sterile product. Royal Hunt is one of the many bands that failed doing this the right way.

Of course, it's easy to blame it on poor band chemistry when you look at the band's Metal Storm page - pretty much the only constant member is the keyboardist, guitarist and mastermind André Andersen, and the list of guest, session and former musicians is vast enough to be compared with Haggard's lineup. But for a band that released a truckload of albums, with a lot of prominent members, I frankly expected better ideas and realization. What we have here is a typical "symphonic" parade, with almost zero prog, most sounds emulated from keyboards, a lot of choirs, forced catchiness (as in: it's not really catchy, but we repeat it a lot of times) and a pretty uninspired band fronted by DC Cooper supporting that impression. The fact that they're not actually playing progressive power but rather symphonic power wouldn't be unsettling at all, since they wouldn't be the first band that mislabels themselves, if only the end result was more pleasing.

I had the pleasure of listening to DC lending his voice to Shadow Gallery on "New World Order", a track from their glorious Tyranny, and I held his singing abilities in very high esteem until I heard this album. He sounds very dry and I cannot help but wonder how does a good vocalist manage to be this unconvincing. But he isn't the only one - almost everything here sounds sub-par. It is symphonic, but not epic; old school power metal, but doesn't invite you to sing along; the musicians are fine, but sound very bored, and they aren't even supported by good production. This is doing music just for the sake of doing music, but people are pretty much eating it up because it's "old-school" and the band is acclaimed.

When you hear young guns such as Shadowside making small steps with huge albums, or renowned progsters such as Pagan's Mind switching genres and being incredibly good at it, it makes you wonder how on earth are these exhausted bands ever gonna match that, and you understand why is the collective metal community slowly losing interest in power metal - the good releases don't come often and don't come from places you'd expect them, so people get bored of looking. Maybe this is not as bad as it seems to me, but I've heard this type of metal being done a thousand times, and I can't say I enjoyed it a lot even the first time around.

copas from http://www.metalstorm.net/pub/review.php?review_id=10087

Tracklist:
01. One More Day (06:15)
02. Another Man Down (05:16)
03. An Empty Shell (04:35)
04. Hard Rain's Coming (05:15)
05. Half Past Loneliness (05:38)
06. Show Me How To Live (10:06)
07. Angel's Gone (05:12)

mp3 320 kbps

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