Band:	Almôra
Album:	Shehrâzad
Style:	Folk metal, Power metal
Release date:	September 21, 2004
Guest review by:	Turerkan

01. Fantasy
02. Rainbow
03. Nightmare
04. 1001 Nights
05. Shehrazad
06. Güneşin Ozanları
07. To Live Is To Fight
08. Hold On To Your Dreams
09. Dream On

Before begining I mustt say that Almora is from my country, Turkey, and they use Turkish folk elements heavily in their music. While I have an experienced ear in Turkish (or more generally eastern) folk melodies, you may not. This means you will have a different experience of interpreting the music. While the familiarity pulls me into Almora's music, your reason could be the orginality you feel in it.

Almora's music is mostly on the soft side of power metal with vocals and non-metal parts of the music being focused. They use a variety of instruments borrowed from classical music.

Compositions are neither advanced nor progressive. It has a tendency to flow thru your ears, without pauses the continuous pace of the music really can be relaxing. While amount of themes, solos and other melodic material is small, each used element has a refined feeling to it (you can't go wrong with folk music) therefore music is not boring by any means. Its just not the power metal of Blind Guardian where you have to listen a 8 minute song 800 times to get the layered guitar melodies. You'll get into this music at first try. And even a hard core Blind Guardian fan will appriciate this music.

Shehrâzad is a different take on the power metal idea, one that can exist together with the other one. Songs are totally constructed on feelings rather than technical success. If you let the emotions flow into your mind you'll be surprised how powerful and exciting this music can be (just opposite of the way DragonForce feels).

The album only has small details that can be criticised from my point of view. First one is the weight of vocals in mixing which puts the music to background sometimes. Another one is, for the first 6 songs you'll be totally amazed with the quality of the music, while last two songs (apart from the ballad at the end) will be a bit of disappointing.

Please also note that I did not treat this album in an easy way, in the way you would do to a newly popping young group. Instead I had the power metal masterpieces in mind for comparison. And definately Almora deserves a place in everyones archives who like any kind of melodic metal, or even rock music.