Magic Never Dies

A fantastic album. Manages to stay true to everything you would want from a power metal album, but with very much its own flavor. Very upbeat and synth heavy, with incredible compositional skills being displayed by Steve Williams here. However, its speed keeps it very energetic, keeping it from feeling too soft. It's a perfect balance of positive, sweet melodies and chord progressions, and speedy, exciting metal. For this reason, I often consider Power Quest to be one of the best compromises you can play when your metal friends and your non-metal friends are hanging out. It's not aggressive enough to make anyone uncomfortable, but it won't disappoint a metalhead, given they aren't quite looking to listen to Slayer.

The vocals on this thing are also fantastic. They are very well suited to the aforementioned upbeat lead melodies, with a very unique and powerful timbre. As for the lyrics he's singing... Well, it's power metal, and though not as bad as some bands may be about this, Power Quest very often opts to have songs whose lyrics are more a collage of randomly chosen happy fantasy buzzwords, rather than actually writing lyrics. Though, to be fair, this isn't always the case, the tracks "Hold on to Love" and "Another World" seem to tell a romantic story of some kind, and even share a common guitar riff, implying some connection, and the track "The Message" is a break up song, but aside from that, most of these songs are pretty shallow lyrics-wise.

Also, speaking of "The Message" I want to note that this is the only track on the album that I don't like. The song opts for a different approach, instead of being speedy and upbeat, it's slow and sad, and I don't feel like either of those things are PQ's forte. I can take slow and sad metal songs, but I feel like for a metal band to pull that off, they need to be intense enough to back up their ballad. But with PQ's style, trying a ballad song like this, it just feels sappy. And if you can dig that, good for you, but it just didn't do it for me.

Aside from that, the only other complaint I could think of is that a lot of the songs on here feel very samey. But hey, I love this band's style so much that, for me personally, if they only had one song that sounded like this, I would only want more. So for me, that's not even a complaint, but I could at least see how someone may feel that way.

Overall though, brilliant album. Give it a listen if you haven't yet, it's well worth it.