A Flame to the Ground Beneath

Now, I really, REALLY have to restrain myself from giving this album a much lower rating and bashing the shit out of it simply because off all these Lost Horizon fanboys telling me how this is the most unique, incomparable, deep, complex and progressive masterpiece by the greatest band evar and whatnot. It seems that Lost Horizon are the most overrated band of the latest times, at least this side of Machine Head. All that fanboy talk really annoys the shit out of me, but alas, I can't bash this band, because when all is said and done, they are definitely not bad - in fact, they are quite a competent and solid modern Euro Power band (and yet, that's almost all they are already).

No, this album is far from unique. It fits the (often false) cliché of Modern Euro Power Metal to the boot: It really all sounds the same, we've heard it all before etc. There's a lot of Helloween in here, with a few leanings on Gamma Ray and Stratovarius as well, but really not as competent as any of those. Catchy happy riffing, keyboards either thin and modern or mystical-ambient sound (sometimes both layered over one another), tempos varied from mid-pace to fast, songs that are long and try to be epic (sometimes successfully, sometimes not so much and end up more repetitive rather than epic), a lot of high-pitched vocals (but far from all - more on the vocals later), a non-existent bass, standard non-technical guitar solos that sometimes feature decent melodies and sometimes not so much, and drums that are kind of just there, do the job and support the music without being distinctive.

So, the songwriting is fairly solid and rather consistent - backing keyboards blend comparably well into the general melodies of the songs, riffs are kind of there - they're never really memorable, but always rather decent while you hear them. The vocal lines put the singer to a very good use - a lot of high-pitched singing, but varied with mid-range and occasionally soft vocals. They're often strongly in the forefront of the music - a lot of times, it seems oriented strongly towards the vocals, whereas everything else, even the guitars is pretty much focused on being background. Oh yeah, there's two rather pointless and boring ambient tracks on here ( "Transdimentional Revelation" and "Deliverance") that really don't give you anything. The synth track "The Song of Earth" is rather decent though, for it actually features music and melody.

Now, the most distinctive feature of this disc - the singer. Daniel Heiman is often noted as one of the, if not the, most awesome singers ever in all of metal or all of music or whatever ( At least by LH's fans). Well, there's a lot of exaggeration going on here - he's certainly no Ripper Owens, or Kai Hansen, or David Defeis, or Eric Adams, or Bruce Dickinson, or Harry Conklin, or any of the best singers out there, but he's still pretty damn good and gives pretty much a 100% performance throughout. He can pull off vocals from mid-range to high soprano marks really well, and does a fair job at screaming (well, his screams could do with more of a punch, but they're still decent). His best performance is probably on the soft vocals - his voice sounds very melodic, emotional and clear in that domain.

So what do we have altogether? A solid, competent modern Euro Power album with tendencies towards epicness that is quite consistent but lacking in variation (note how I don't even go into the single songs apart from the interludes - you've got pretty similar stuff throughout) or originality, featuring a very talented singer who definitely is within the upper fields on the list of Power Metal vocalists and gives a worthwhile performance pushing his abilities to the maximum, but nothing else that really stands out in any way or hasn't been done before (and often better, at that). It's not really wrong to pick it up and quite a fun listen overall, but it's far from an essential album and you're not really missing anything if you just leave it out.