Inner Storm

My first impression on this band was "Holy crap, these guys look pretty sweet!" They had the cool album art, and the cool name, and the REALLY awesome logo that probably took time and effort to make. It's a shame that they left a bad taste in my mouth at many points. Of course, the fact that these guys are an up-and-coming Power Metal band from my home country of Canada compels me to support them, and I need to get these gripes out in the open.

Firstly, the singer. Oh, the singer. This guy is a talented vocalist, but throughout the three songs, he constantly jacks his vocals chords up into the nut-crunching register without any warning, and it is usually layered over his normal voice register. Most of the time this voice-layering stuff sounds akward, messy, and simply not needed. There isn't any buil-up to his high notes, either. It's extremely sudden. The singer gets better as the songs progress, but he needs to lay off a bit, methinks.

Next. Keyboards. Suffocating keyboards. I'm guessing the the keys are supposed to be the real melody-driving instruments here, which is okay, but not only are they suffocating, but they seem to have trouble keeping up with the guitaring speed. They need a bit more precision in the playing.The rest of the intruments are fairly typical Flowery-Power metal. Double bass kicks all over the place, fast-paced guitars (I really don't enjoy the soloing for the most part) and bass playing. Not much to speak of. Something I noticed during the whole CD, is that the songs still sound really empty, or lacking richness, or something. I think there isn't quite enough bass, or something, because there is a big gap in the sound.

Now, the songs themselves. The first song (Spiritual nemesis) is... Poor. I'm assuming that this is the first song that they recorded, because it's the worst on this disk. The vocals are at their worst, as well as the keys, and drumming. It's a pretty poor flower-metal song. However, it does get better.

The following two songs are pretty impressive. The Second one (Winter Heaven) is good, but not much to scream about. Both of these songs are several times better than Spiritual Nemesis though, which is good. The final song, Inner Storm, is a very great tune. I really enjoyed the acoustic bit about halfway through the song. The vocals also flow better in this song, they keys are more geared towards the background, and the chorus is very catchy, and the drums don't overdo anything. The guitarists actually get a chance to strut their stuff a bit, and all is good. After hearing this song, I truely believed that these guys had some real potential. This song alone is worth what you may pay for this disk.

So, These guys really do have some talent, and the ability to write songs, but they need to sit down and think things through a bit more. Are those sudden changes in voice pitch adding depth to the songs? Are the keyboard melodies meshing well with the guitaring? Do the solos sound appealing to the ears? Those are the questions Icewind needs to ask themselves as they write more music. They've got some good potential, and I'll be keeping my eye on them, and I'll definately get a copy of their debut album.