Band:	Clairvoyants
Album:	Word To The Wise
Style:	Heavy metal
Release date:	January 12, 2009
A review by:	Bas

01. Journey To The Stars
02. The Lone
03. Choose The Truth
04. The Pain Of Sight
05. Sheer Hate
06. Back To My Dreams
07. Step Aside
08. Closure
09. Word To The Wise
10. Hallowed Be Thy Name [Iron Maiden cover]

Clairvoyants is a quintet from Italy that started as an Iron Maiden tribute band back in 2001 and has now released its debut album with own compositions (except for the last track, a cover of the awesome "Hallowed Be Thy Name"). I suppose you can already guess where these guys get most of their influences from?

The band plays a style similar to Iron Maiden during the first Dickinson era, yet with a bit of a more modern approach and some power metal (bits of both the heavier US and the more melodic European style) riffs added to the fold, comparing these guys to Angra wouldn't be that far-fetched either. Although the songwriting as well as the whole instrumental section, guitar solos included, is heavily influenced by the heavy metal legends, Clairvoyants never really copy and the CD definitely has a more personal feeling than I would have expected.

Word To The Wise starts off with a real bomb of a track. "Journey Through The Stars" should be more than enough to convince all fans of melodic heavy metal and power metal that these guys really have something, or a few things, up their sleeves. Unfortunately the rest of the album doesn't live up to the awesome opening track, but that doesn't mean it's bad, not at all! There are a lot of cool riffs and solos and the singer is really good too, he doesn't sound like Dickinson at all, but he has a slightly raw and melodic heavy metal voice with a wide range and fits extremely well with the music.

In general the songwriting is good, but there's some filler on here too, "Sheer Hate" for example seems to drag the quality of the whole album down a bit. Speaking of quality, the production is my main criticism against this CD. On some of the tracks you can really feel that they'd be much much better if only the guitars had some more energy behind them. A shame, really, and I hope that the Clairvoyants will make sure this will be better on the next album. Further they should get rid of the filler, add a few catchy choruses here and there and also make their ballads a bit more emotional in the future. If they can manage these things they could well release a mind-blowing piece of melodic heavy metal!

By the way this debut also features Andre Matos (ex-Shaaman, ex-Angra) singing on "Hallowed Be Thy Name" and Oliver Palotai (Kamelot, Doro ) hitting the keys on the ballad "Closure".