Released: 2007
Messiah's Kiss disappointed me with their previous album, Metal. From the cool retro-esque style they had cultivated on Prayer for the Dying, they had gone all plastic Euro-power metal on me. Perhaps I'm not the only one who thought they'd done the wrong thing with this move, because Dragonheart strikes a nice balance between both.
For every big, mid-paced HammerFall-style epic like "Babylon" and "Thunders of the Night", they chuck in a ball-tearing belter like "Nocturnal" to balance things out. Each time they go into a modern power-metal cheese direction with something like "Where the Falcons Cry" (which is almost as cringingly bad as it sounds), Messiah's Kiss then steps back to the forge to renew the glories of the old days. The title track sounds so much like Judas Priest with its overlapping high-pitched wails and rapid-fire vocal delivery of lyrics about steel, fire and Hell that I had to make sure I hadn't put Stained Class on by mistake. Ditto for "Steelrider", and the "Do it! Do it!" refrain from "Open Fire" couldn't possibly be a mere coincidence.
This was precisely the kind of stuff that I liked about Messiah's Kiss in the first place. Dragonheart is so gloriously metal, so shameless and bald-faced in its virtual plagiarism of Priest and Accept and so unashamed of what it is that it doesn't really matter that there's virtually no originality about it whatsoever. It's a melting-pot of old school influences that the band has worked into an almost-perfect homage of everything metal without it turning into a parody of itself. It's about ten minutes shorter than Metal was too, and that's also a bonus.
If they could just shake off the temptation to throw in a power metal song every now and then, they could give Primal Fear a good run for their money.
- The Ancient Cries
- Babylon
- Where the Falcons Cry
- Dragonheart
- Thunder of the Night
- Steelrider
- City of Angels
- Nocturnal
- Northern Nights
- Open Fire
- The Ivory Gates
Rating: 72%
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