Time Walker

Power metal can be a funny thing. Sometimes a band claiming to be "power metal" actually plays music closer to heavy or thrash metal. Or, in Crystal Ball's case, hard rock. Contain your gasps of surprise! Crystal Ball is more of a hard rock band than anything else, resulting in an album full of poppy catchiness and lacking the common tropes of the power metal genre. This should not come as a surprise, since the band themselves strictly call their style "hard rock" in all of their literature. I have to say I agree with their assessment!

This is not a concept album. Not even in the vaguest sense. The songs are all based around a single chunk of lame subject matter, whether that's the Berlin Wall, Lindbergh's solo flight over the Atlantic, or the meteorologists who fly planes into hurricanes. I guess, with five previous full-length albums hung up on the wall, there wasn't much left for the band to sing about. The lyrics are predictably simple, with few metaphors or other fancy linguistic constructs. It's also funny to note that, in each song, the chorus is based around the title of that song. So when "Tear Down the Wall" starts playing through your speakers, and you want to sing along, it's a pretty safe bet to just start yelling the title of the song when it sounds like the chorus is about to start.

Speaking of singing along, you might end up doing that quite a bit during a playthrough of this album. The songs are catchy - too catchy. Power metal is often deemed catchy, but it's only catchy relative to other subgenres of metal; compared to popular music, power metal is complicated and esoteric. Not so with this album; if you took out the guitars (or made their tone less heavy) and made the vocalist a little less hard-edged, you would have a pop-rock album. The vocal lines are simple and hummable, the drummer plays insultingly basic rock beats, and the riffs only occasionally end up evoking heaviness. Only when the band introduces some double-bass drumming and fast guitars do I really get excited by the music: the song "Fallen from Grace" has a rollicking keyboard lead and some crunchy riffs that wouldn't be out of place on a Mob Rules album.

There are solos, but they are usually gone before you realize that they've started. These songs are too compact, and too straightforward, for shredding guitar to have a place in them, so you are treated to eight bars of slow soloing before the band goes back to business. In general, there are very few surprises to be discovered in this album; verse-chorus-verse-chorus-"break-with-maybe-a-solo"-chorus is the only structure that the band is familiar with. Keyboards often make their presence felt, and you might think that this additional layer of sound would provide some interest, but the keys break free of the "backing-instrument" role, so we get a lot of wavery Hammond-organ-sounding stuff but not a lot of real substance.

The high point of this band would probably be the vocalist, Mark Sweeney. His voice is suited perfectly for this type of music: it's forceful and features just the perfect amount of grittiness. Not a voice hardened by decades of chain-smoking, but also not one that just plopped out of a church choir either. Too bad that the lyrics he's singing are so juvenile.

I honestly can't compare this band to many other bands, since I am not very familiar with hard rock as a genre. You could look to some of the big-name hard rock bands like Scorpions or Dokken as influences for Crystal Ball, as well as the German heavy metal scene (featuring such oddly-named bands as Custard, Chinchilla, and Pump). Overall, Crystal Ball's sound can be simply described as power metal, stripped- and watered-down to the point where it is just heavier-than-average rock. It's very catchy and fun, but I'm not a fan. The few glimpses of real metal that we get on this album are just too tantalizing, and it lessens the effect of the rest of the songs. And then there's a Britney Spears cover at the end. That says it all.