Extreme Power Metal

This album is the Inhuman Rampage of Marc Hudson Dragonforce, and my second-favorite album by Dragonforce. This album brings the 80's back in full force, from the stupidly cheesy and funny album cover to the synths provided by Coen Janssen of Epica (Vadim left in 2018 due to being a dad, and being mostly forgotten about on the last album). This album brings back Sam for writing songs and lyrics instead of just giving Fred control of everything, and the sound shifted away from the harder metal sound of Reaching Into Infinity, and allows for more of an 80's-ish style. This album also has a dragon on it, just like RII, as well as an old Lamborghini.

Most of the songs on here are good: Highway To Oblivion is the TTFAF of this album: It's long, it's great, it's written by Sam Totman, and it has good solos. One of the comments on the music video said this song was "TronForce", and that's pretty accurate, considering the fact that Sam Totman was riding a Tron bike in the video. This is the only time Sam will ever be allowed behind the wheel of a motor vehicle due to how drunk he is 24/7. Cosmic Power Of The Infinite Shred Machine is a beautiful song about something with space, and exploring the galaxy, but you're too busy listening to Marc's incredible vocals to care what he's singing about. Strangers and Heart Demolition are cheese-fests that embody the 80's spirit extremely well, with cheesy lyrics, sawtooth synth effects, and lyrics about love and passion. It has the energy of glam rock and Kenny Loggins without the saxophone. Razorblade Meltdown is my favorite in terms of lyrics, and it has a keyboard solo, which still hits well despite the fact that it's not Vadim doing it. Troopers Of The Stars is probably the cheesiest song on here, but it does the cheese so well. Also it has a bass intro, which is even rarer than a bass solo.

This album doesn't have any "bad" songs, but there are a few songs that aren't as hard-hitting. The Last Dragonborn is kinda meh. It's a decent song on its own, but it's nowhere near as good as the other songs, so it kinda falls to the bottom when put up against the others. It's like Cry Thunder: It's not even in the top half of the album, and yet the band insists on playing it all the damn time. Troopers Of The Stars is a great song, and another single from the album, but the band hasn't played this song live yet even though it's much better. They played Razorblade Meltdown despite not even having a keyboardist to do the solo, and they played Remembrance Day a couple times, so why not play Troopers Of The Stars? Which brings me to my next point: Remembrance Day isn't a great ballad. Marc wanted to pay tribute to soldiers who died in combat for "Remembrance Day", which is called Memorial Day in America. Unfortunately, good intentions aren't always the best. This song sounds a little too Sabaton-ish, and the lyrics are beautiful, but the actual song itself doesn't hit as hard. If they wanted to make the song better, I think the bagpipes (yes, they brought bagpipes in) should have been replaced with a violin. I know they could have gotten a violin, because Mia Asano played for Marc on his solo album, and she nailed the sound.

The album closes with a cover of My Heart Will Go On from Titanic, and this song is so stupid it actually works. Dragonforce has a thing for taking songs that shouldn't be metal and making them sound good as metal. They did it with Johnny Cash, they did it with Celine Dion, and now they're gonna be doing it with Taylor Swift. This album has enough metal to rebuild the Titanic.

If I had to describe the vibe of this album, I'd say "Dragonforce has fun". They started doing more songs about video games and movies, and they're doing cheesier 80's songs. Overly cheesy metal *cough cough Victorius* doesn't always work, but Dragonforce was able to be super 80's and still keep their sound.

Extreme Power Metal has to be one of the most unfortunate albums to have been released, certainly in recent times. Not because it’s bad – actually, because it’s a pretty good album from a band that had become practically irrelevant by the time the album came out. Long story short, any good will built up by Guitar Hero having “Through the Fire and the Flames”, as well as the first three albums being genuinely great albums, had all but dissipated since then with increasingly less good albums and a further stripping down of their sound. From the high-flying over the top power metal to a more standardized and powerless sound that resulted in the crappy Reaching into Infinity, it just seemed like Dragonforce were done.

So, for Extreme Power Metal to be as good as it is, is quite impressive. After being greeted by some neon keyboards, “Highway to Oblivion” and “Cosmic Power of the Infinite Shred Machine” kickstart our hearts with high-octane, high-impact shredding that sounds like the album art looks. It’s loud, it’s explosive, it’s stupidly over the top – in other words, it’s fucking fun! Even more mid-paced joints like “Heart Demolition” are jam-fuckin’-packed with so much bounce and flair, that they maintain the momentum set by the faster tracks. It’s like Herman Li and Sam Totman had found their muses again, with energetic riffs and high-flying solos permeating throughout this album while Gee Anzalone provides those hard-hitting beats that amplify their performances something fierce. It’s like these massive surges of energy pulsating throughout a good chunk of the album.

It’s not all stereotypical Dragonforce all the time. “Heart Demolition” sees them playing around with keyboards and synthesizers that add a very 80s, very feel-good atmosphere to an already upbeat composition. Then you get “Strangers” which is a very 80s track – between the heavy synth presence and AOR songwriting, all backed up by the peppy mid-paced riffs and soaring soloing. This shit is catchier than a cold in the middle of winter. This is where Marc Hudson’s falsettos feel the most at home. Not saying he’s ill-fitting in the more Dragonforce-sounding songs as he’s got the right kind of voice and puts some oomph into this vocals (unlike in the last few albums where there’s not a whole lot of that, oftentimes compensating with a ton of vocal layers), but I mean, put him in these AOR-esque tracks that don’t require massively soaring vocals and he’s sounding great! Even on “Remembrance Day” – a power ballad – he fits like a glove as he provides some heart-felt vocals. But yeah, when Dragonforce aren’t somehow back to their old tricks like it’s 2008 all over again, it’s the most unapologetically 80s that it could be. It’s the sort of thing Family Guy would’ve cut away to during its earlier revival seasons. Man, it’s almost like that time those robot dinosaurs attacked us!

“Remembrance Day” itself is a pretty ineffective song as its hooks lack the necessary sharpness to make its power pop stylings have the necessary power and pop. The Celine Deion cover is a rather nothing kind of affectation. Bit of an anti-climax, considering that the bulk of Extreme Power Metal is a whirlwind of excitement that’s not been seen from the Dragonforce camp in a good goddamn while. I’d imagine the initial ethos behind this album was to throw their remaining fans a bone and recapture some lost fans after the last couple of albums didn’t do so great, and you know what? Yeah, Extreme Power Metal definitely scratches that itch left by those other Marc Hudson albums, and damn, does it feel good or what...

I'm aware DragonForce didn't exactly invent absurdist electro-power metal, but as far as "putting it on the map" is concerned, I still put the smoking gun in the hands of Ultra Beatdown. That album's sweat has since been lapped up by modern imitators like Gloryhammer, Victorious, Twilight Force, and god knows how many others, all being bred in laboratories for maximum meme potential. DragonForce in particular had repeatedly exhausted my patience with this shtick, and boy did last album's Death cover not help matters. At first glimpse, Extreme Power Metal looked less like an album and more like a cry for help, and I was so ill-disposed toward the band at this point, I was ready to "help them" in the Doctor Kevorkian sense. So you can imagine my disappointment when I found it to be pretty damn good.

The first of many caveats is that Extreme Power Metal bears many of the hallmarks of their trademark goofy and quixotic power metal. That is to say, get ready for overpowering synth stings, machine gun drumming that doesn't even pretend to be possible, sickly sweet chorus harmonies, and guitar solos that sound like malfunctioning microwaves. So this is not, by any degree whatsoever, reminiscent of DragonForce's pre-Guitar Hero days, back when they wrote riffy, punchy, Persuader-esque power metal that sounded genuinely menacing. Instead, this is merely a retread of their old formula with a much more effective approach to songwriting. Still saccharine cheese-flavored bubblegum, but goddamn do these songs get stuck in your head.

My personal favorite is the horrendously titled 'Cosmic Power of the Infinite Shred Machine'. Its composition and subject matter is what would happen if Helstar's 'Winds of War' got caught in one of those spinning cotton candy machines. Portentous and bold, this track strides ahead with thumping riffs and a ghostly theremin that accents the melody, exuding a deep, appropriately spacey atmosphere. I particularly enjoyed the over-the-top keytar section that it builds up to. It may sound strange, but this is what I routinely hope for from modern Malmsteen albums - a juicy blend of modern shredding that pixelates into brazenly 80's synth without even the slightest implication of self-consciousness. Another one of my favorites is 'Razorblade Meltdown', which manages to sound something like what Steelwing was concocting in their overlooked Zone of Alienation triumph. I was surprised to get some Riot V vibes from this song too. Note, specifically Riot V; the iteration that marched on after Mark Reale's untimely passing. Vocalist Marc Hudson sounds an awful lot like Riot V's Todd Michael Hall, taking command of consistently powerful high registers, not to mention some impressive falsetto like 'In A Skyforged Dream'.

But I'm still not quite done with my caveats. For instance, I actually preferred the heavily edited version of 'Highway to Oblivion' that was released as a promo track. The album version meanwhile was weighed down with cumbersome setpieces that hurt its overall flow. And you can apply this phenomenon to the entire album, pretty much. While no one song feels like throwaway fluff - except for one that's so bad it deserves its own paragraph - it's instead a matter of nearly all tracks outwearing their welcome. Herman Li's notoriously decadent solos, the completely unnecessary intro of 'Strangers' that sounds like Bubble Bobble music, take your pick. This album is remarkably less verbose than previous outings, but it can still drag like all hell.

So the track I alluded to earlier is obviously 'Remembrance Day'. It's bad. The chorus is damn-near self-plagiarism, sounding like 'Through the Fire and Flames' played in slow-motion. Not only that, but the entire song's impulse just doesn't sit well with me. A flag-waving salute to casualties of war, blanketed under tongue-in-cheek power-pop? Gee, what other 2019 power metal release does that remind me of. Not even the skip button could save me, because beyond that was a ridiculous cover of Celine Dion's 'My Heart Will Go On', which works about as stupidly well as you'd expect it to, and a Japan-only bonus track 'Behind the Mirror of Death', which I found to be preposterously boring. But hey, a little anti-climax never hurt anyone, except for me that one time, so I'm willing to overlook Extreme Power Metal's atrocious dismount and still give it a cautious recommendation, as it's the best this band has sounded in over a decade.

DragonForce's Extreme Power Metal is a quite misleading album title. Without abandoning its trademark guitar duels and keyboard sounds, this album is one of the easiest to digest in their discography. It offers several mid-paced tunes and a few quirky ideas. While the songwriting doesn't offer anything new, it's diversified enough to entertain from start to finish through nine regular tunes and a few bonus tracks.

Fans of the band's early days will get songs like the vibrant opener ''Highway to Oblivion'' with its technically stunning guitar solos, saccharine vocals and pumping rhythm sections. The final result sounds like a mixture of Helloween, Manowar and a Christmas tune with increased speed. It's totally cheesy but in a sympathetically entertaining way. There aren't too many bands around who play this type of joyous European power metal anymore. It has become a rare treat and is good for what it is.

''The Last Dragonborn'' isn't the first song of the band to flirt with Asian folk sounds but they don't sound like a gimmick in a gigantic potpourri here but are actually the stylistic guideline throughout the tune and truly establish an enchanting atmosphere. The song is surprisingly slow by DragonForce's standards which makes it stand out even more. This isn't only an album but a career highlight.

Single ''Heart Demolition'' isn't the anticipated high-speed tune but rather an eighties' pop song with melodic metal guitar work. Especially the song's calmer and moodier parts and melodic vocals convince and offer rather unusual soundscapes by DragonForce's standards. Once again, the song has a lot of commercial appeal and could have also been on the soundtrack for Ready Player One but it's some sort of guilty pleasure on this output and simply put a fun tune that will be remembered.

''Troopers of the Stars'' kicks off with impressive bass guitar sounds that manage to impress more than the guitar play for once. This record is Frédéric Leclercq's swansong with DragonForce's as the talented bassist has recently been joining German thrash metal veterans Kreator. He is going to be replaced by Canadian YouTuber Steve Terreberry during upcoming live shows. Let's see how these curious combinations work out.

''Remembrance Day'' ends the regular album on a truly epic note with military march drum patterns and bagpipe sounds before a majestic and melodic mid-paced power metal song evolves over five highly entertaining minutes. This kind of song could have also come from HammerFall in its best years.

Not every song and experiment is a success on this release. The band has already delivered cringe-worthy cover songs in the past but the happy high-speed interpretation of Céline Dion's ''My Heart Will Go On'' really takes the cake. One has to admit that the band quite obviously enjoyed itself while playing this track and it's funny to listen to it once but it easily becomes one of the most obnoxious over-the-top tunes in DragonForce's massive discography.

In the end, DragonForce's Extreme Power Metal is vibrant, entertaining and at times even creative within the band's specific stylistic boundaries. It's easily the group's best effort since singer Marc Hudson joined the band eight years ago. Those who had given up on the band should give this record a chance and will recognize a certain return to form. Those who have always despised the band obviously won't change their minds while listening to this cheesy but addictive release.

Take one look at my pseudonym here and you'll realise why this is such a big deal. So let me begin telling you how an entity in the past couple of years has left me completely disappointed and alienated. Of course I'm referring to the game franchise Forza Motorsport. Ha, got you again. However, in all seriousness, life as a fan of DragonForce has been quite a rollercoaster especially in the past five years. I'm sure I'm not the only one who has had gripes about the prior two releases. I even went as far as saying that DragonForce's best song in 2017 was their cover of Ed Sheeran's "Shape of You" with popular Youtuber PelleK, completely discarding their "Reaching Into Infinity" album.

Yet I still got sucked in to the singles teased in the run up to this latest release. And out of blind loyalty I followed through with the whole product. I thought I would never get over the irreversible fact that Marc Hudson is there. I really was a misery guts but I wanted to be objective and after all, I am a firm believer of second chances, and third and fourth, etc. But even the most fiercely loyal people know when to give up, like me with Dark Moor. With the decline of *other* bands (to avoid more unnecessary name drops) I was fearful that DragonForce were beginning to go on the same vector. However, I was thankfully proven wrong.

So let's talk about the album which weirdly shares a name one of their old songs. The first couple of songs are interesting and offer something closer to their sound of yesteryear. Compared to the era of its namesake, they're not quite the same but it's not apples to apples. It's plain to hear that it's not quite so overblown and grandiose but a lot tighter, which suits Hudson a lot more and he can really make an impression of his own as opposed to filling Theart's shoes, which is nearly impossible.

Still, there is plenty of room to explore themes and elaborate on the barebones fast tempo and shred guitar solos. "The Last Dragonborn" is directly about Skyrim. By now, DragonForce has built a reputation for their guitar work and often "dueling" solos but it seems a lot more balanced here. The guitars are not neglected at all, mind you, which keeps me and likely many others very happy. But they haven't packed sweep picks and arpeggios from hell into every nook and cranny, instead bringing the bass and keyboard into play,

In the second half the listener will come across one of my picks of the bunch in "Razorblade Meltdown" which has contains Finnish swearing, so a warning for any polite-mouthed natives there. The second half feels a lot closer to home in terms of their roots, the tempo picks up more often. Although the tempo is still not what it used to be ten or more years ago the structure overall leans a lot more that way. They seemed to have injected a lot more fun into the fray, a lot less obligation, and it shows in the fluency of the finished product. I think this suits Hudson more and he's in his element a lot more. They seem to have extracted enough fun to include a Céline Dion cover, and meme artists everywhere rejoice.

Overall I enjoyed this a lot and it's a step in the right direction. They seem to be in a healthier place where they're having fun, they're not scraping the barrel for ideas. So I hope this review among others here help potential listeners on the fence. Give this a listen.

I never expected this album to be as good as it is, since Dragonforce has been sliding into mediocrity for years now. After losing singer ZP Theart in 2010 they switched styles to a more palatable, restrained version of their once egregiously, gloriously over the top sound of the early ‘00s. And the last album Reaching Into Infinity was a serious piece of shit album and I wasn’t sure they’d ever release something good again. But here’s Extreme Power Metal, which sees them essentially returning to their roots in a way.

It doesn’t exactly sound like their classics like Sonic Firestorm - it’s not some rehash. But it does sound like the same band as back then, with more of the cool little ear-worm guitar parts that Sam Totman and Herman Li used to engage in that have been missing from recent, more generic albums, and a return to a clearer, less cluttered writing style than their overloaded latter-2000s works. So it really eschews a lot of their worst habits from the last decade or so, which is a nice change. Even singer Marc Hudson sounds better than he ever has, with more attitude and conviction.

Songs like “Cosmic Power Of The Infinite Shred Machine” and “The Last Dragonborn” have some legit cool musicianship and more measured songwriting, without resorting to gimmicks like some of the band’s sillier output has. Other tracks like “Highway To Oblivion” and “Razorblade Meltdown” sound like any number of songs in the band’s past, but done with more verve and energy than they’ve had in years – and if we’re going to castigate metal bands for plagiarizing their past, well, you wouldn’t listen to much metal at all.

It’s just fucking solid, and sounds like a band having fun again. The visual aesthetic of the thing is old 80s style Tron stuff, all neon colors and classic video games and futuristic synths, though they don’t play this up as much as the promotional videos alluded – I’d like to see them go further into some wild 80s synthesizer stuff, actually. But even if some tracks like “Heart Demolition” sound like basic 80s spandex rock pumped up with power metal energy, hell, I’m all in for it; it sounds like what they should’ve been doing all along for the last few years.

Only reason I’m not rating this higher is the last two songs, as ballad “Remembrance Day” has some cringe-y lyrics and a lame chorus, and the Celine Dion cover just kind of goes by in a blur – it’s better than the Johnny Cash one a few years ago, but still not really an essential song by any measure.

But the first eight songs on this thing are all first rate power metal. It’s a Dragonforce album, so you know what it is – it’s corny and mostly style over substance. But this band is a lot of fun and when you’re in the mood, this is likely one of the better albums they’ve done overall.

Despite being one of the more popular and arguably iconic figures to come out of the millennial power metal revival, DragonForce shares a somewhat odd relationship with the broader scene. Born out of the twilight of the late 90s intermingling of older melodic metal stylistic trappings with death and black metal that birthed a blackened New Zealand rival to Children Of Bodom dubbed Demoniac, there has always been an implicitly extreme character to their signature sound. However, this sound wasn’t extreme so much for an intermingling of those death/black metal elements that came to define the Finnish melodeath sound of the early 2000s, but more so for being an exaggerated expression of power metal’s Helloween roots. This was a band that did things similarly to the likes of Gamma Ray, Stratovarius and Hammerfall, they simply did it faster and fancier, achieving a niche similar to what Michael Angelo Batio’s famed late 80s band Nitro brought to heavy metal within a power metal context, complete with a similarly auspicious virtuoso axe-man in Herman Li to launch an already cartoonish sound into the proverbial stratosphere.

Over the years this outfit has garnered its fair share of criticism and praise, with the likes of Kai Hansen hailing them as standard-bearers for the scene at their height in popularity during the Guitar Hero craze, and a number of purists within the field dismissing them as a parody of the style. In all fairness, their earlier period with South African vocalist ZP Theart at the helm was generally defined by the elongated guitar solo battles of Herman Li and chief songwriter Sam Totman, alongside an increasingly quirky synth-obsessed sound courtesy of keyboardist Vadim Pruzhanov that blurred the lines between metal and old school video game soundtracks and song lengths that rarely came in under the six minute mark. Though they never really abandoned this exaggerated stylistic niche, the exodus of Theart and entry of current vocalist Marc Hudson, coinciding with the onset of the current decade no less, ushered in a more restrained version of this band where accessible songwriting shares an equal footing with the wild technical extravaganzas and break-neck tempos. It is into this context that their eight album and fourth under this new paradigm, dubbed Extreme Power Metal (their style’s namesake no less), finds itself.

In contrast to the varied, occasionally genre-defying 2017 opus of this fold in Reaching Into Infinity, this album is a bit more in line with what most come to expect from the DragonForce brand. Much of this owes to the fact that principle songwriter Sam Totman penned most of the music and bassist and more eclectic songwriter Frederic Leclercq has moved back into a secondary songwriter role, providing some needed contrast to Totman’s driving, sing-along romps rather than dominating the fray. Instead, what occurs here is an almost perfect amalgam of the measured pomp of The Power Within and the campy exploits of Maximum Overload, showcasing the highflying adventurism that this band has largely clung to with some occasional hints of their older days thrown in for added effect. Particularly on longer cruisers reminiscent of the mid-2000s incarnation of the band like “Highway To Oblivion” and “Cosmic Power Of The Infinite Shred Machine”, the usual blend of syrupy melodic goodness and raging speed metal riffing finds Totman and Li up to their old tricks in the solo department, venturing dangerously close to the good old days of Inhuman Rampage.

The dividing lines between songwriters is arguably the only thing more pronounced than the collective return to form found on here, and it provides for a very engaging listen with plenty of staying power. Leclercq showcases his greater affinity with older heavy metal with a couple of more mid-paced and symmetrically structured anthems in “Heart Demolition” and “Strangers” that, nevertheless, rival Totman’s contributions in the choral bombast department, whereas the high-octane melodic explosion “In A Skyforged Dream” could almost pass for a Totman offering save that it’s a bit more thrashing and punchy. The real standout offering of the bunch, however, is the collaboration of Totman with session keyboardist Coen Janssen (of Epica fame) dubbed “The Last Dragonborn”, a Japanese-music inspired crushing groove machine and epic offering that could almost pass for a Kamelot song were Hudson not handling vocals and the lead guitar work was toned down a bit. Arguably the only song on here that battles with the aforementioned one for prominence is the “My Heart Will Go On” cover, which has a certain novel charm to it in all its high speed, video-game infused campiness that essentially reprises what they did with Johnny Cash’s “Ring Of Fire” five years ago.

Having existed in one form or another for the past 20 years, it’s been a rather unique run for this Pan-Anglo and sometimes French and Eastern European outfit, and the recent exodus of long time bassist and frequent compositional contributor Frederic Leclercq has found this band closing yet another in a series of ongoing eras. It’s been something of an ongoing ironic situation for him, given his more expressed interest in metal genres apart from power metal despite being a prominent figure in said style both with this outfit and the equally apt if somewhat less prolific French band Heavenly, but his recent recruitment by Teutonic thrash legends Kreator seems a fitting outcome for him, and the future will no doubt find DragonForce with a new bassist and a renewed vigor for the studio. It’s been a fun ride thus far, and there are little signs of slowing down as the dawn of a new decade looms. Will it be an age of extreme power metal heroes? Undoubtedly, if Sam Totman and company have anything to say on the matter.

Originally written for Sonic Perspectives (www.sonicperspectives.com)