As petty as it is to quip over things like album titles and song track lists, Mystic Prophecy is really getting into kind of a rut with these album titles. I mean, is “combining two ‘bad ass’ sounding things together” really the best summation of your creative wit? Fireangel, Ravenlord and now Killhammer. Not to mention the redundant song titling: Two songs with “Kill,” two with “Hell,” two with “Fire” and plenty of generic metal clichés parboiled into a stew of mediocrity from which there is no return – lots of blood, damnation, blackness, angels and warriors. They don’t miss a single one. None of this would matter if this was good at all, but this is pretty much devoid of any kind of spark or fire.
It’s just Mystic Prophecy going through the motions. It’s perfectly listenable power metal – plenty of German power metal stomping, plenty of gruff choruses. I wish I could say the riffs were better, but they’re basically just dumb-chunking at this point. Occasionally they kick up a nice thrashy gallop, but even so, it’s all very passé. The whole thing is mired in the ‘50% thrashy power metal, 50% slick hard rock’ thing this genre has become famous for. The riffs are heavy as a bag of bricks and slick as hell, but there’s just so little of interest. Frankly, they were more interesting with Gus G, years behind them now, than they are here. Bands shouldn't regress this much in songwriting after initially showing such promise, but there you go.
The basic atmosphere they seem to be going for is ‘sweat soaked innards of your neighborhood gymnasium,’ as pretty much all these songs are built on big, stupid rhythms made for lifting weights to. RD Liapakis sounds okay, but pretty tired for all that, and the band seems to be unwilling to change up their vocal lines at all – these are pretty much identical to any of the ones on the last two albums. Here and there you get some semi-harsh vocals, but bleh. They add nothing of value to the songs. The one exception is “Warriors of the Northern Sea,” which is actually a killer song. But other than that, you can probably skip this and not be any worse off in life.