Sacred Oath - Ravensong review
| Band: | Sacred Oath |
| Album: | Ravensong |
| Style: | Heavy metal, US power metal |
| Release date: | September 18, 2015 |
| A review by: | deadone |
01. Death Kills
02. Taken
03. Necrodancer
04. Ravensong
05. So Cold
06. Live And Burn
07. Culture Of Sin
08. Heaven-Sent, Hell-Bent
09. When All Is Said And Done
10. Brighter Than The Sun
So it turns out the metal gods do in fact listen to our prayers. Ask for a ballsy, melodic heavy/power metal album that's not overproduced and not rooted in Helloween clichés and the metalgods grant not one but two such albums in the form of the new Armored Saint as well as the album in question, Sacred Oath's Ravensong. But are the gods truly generous or just a bunch of fickle tricksters who give with one hand only to take with the other?
For a while now yours truly has been lamenting that traditional and power metal has degenerated into sad over produced clichés. At the same time I've been mourning the 1990s when you didn't have to look hard to find traditional/power metal that was ballsy and heavy and didn't sound like an overproduced third rate Helloween clone. Even Helloween didn't sound like an overproduced third rate Helloween clone like they do now.
Ravensong is best described as US power metal. It's slower, rawer and more meaty than its European counterpart. It's not exactly old school in a 1980s kind of way either. Rather it borrows from modern hard rock and groovier types of metal much like the more interesting power metal bands ala Angel Dust. Tad Morose, Iced Earth and Helloween did in the 1990s or as Metal Church did in the 1980s and early 1990s. It does stray more to the hard rock side of things than thrash metal so don't expect something frantic.
These boys can write catchy tunes and riffs. There is a real sense of rock sensibility here. Each song stands on its own merit with its own distinctive melodies. The guitar solos are a highlight and when fully unleashed, bring to mind some of the great solos from the 1980s and occasionally the legendary Slash especially on "So Cold".
On the upside Ravensong is not overproduced as is so typical in the scene now. It is however not well produced either. The sound is somewhat underwhelming and lacking in clarity at times. As a result it sounds somewhat amateurish. This really needed a Terry Date production job to make it shine.
It also fails to gain in momentum. Sure the songs are good, but occasionally seem to not fully reach their potential, such as on "When All Is Said And Done" which builds up in anticipation but never truly attains a climax.
So yes the metal gods are bunch of fickle tricksters. Ravensong sounds fresh in the context of a current stale traditional/power metal scene. It's a good album, full of enjoyable songs. But alas, its underwhelming and amateurish production and lack of momentum means it's not the album traditional/power metal needed to resurrect it.
Rating breakdown
| Performance: | 7 |
| Songwriting: | 8 |
| Originality: | 8 |
| Production: | 5 |
Written by deadone | 26.07.2015
Comments
Comments: 3
Visited by: 87 users
| Lord_Regnier Posts: 1469  |
About Power/Heavy being stale: Keep in mind that it is only my opinion (and probably biased by the fact that I'm a fan of extreme Metal and don't care for Powermetal or traditional Heavy Metal). In no way do I pretend to 'know'. I'm just advancing a hypothesis. What I think is the simplier, more basic musically a genre is, the more it will have a tendency to stagnate as time goes by. Why? Because the more basic music is, the less space it has for innovation. Think of it as a 'saturation threshold'. With genres that range from very slow to extremely fast, I believe it leaves more space for tempo changes, incorporating different song structures and even different parts in the same song, different sounds. A possibility to incorporate more different riffs and other guitarwork and varied drumming, etc. If used efficiently, with good songwriting abilities, you have more room than in a genre like Powermetal in which you never play too fast, riffs are not supposed to be too Thrashy, drums don't blast, it must not sound too raw, etc. A genre like that will reach saturation earlier because it gets harder and harder to innovate since there is not enough room for it, as it is so trapped in a few strict gimmicks. After a while, pretty much everything has been done. Also, in more extreme genres, there are more opportunities for different vocal styles. Some genres don't use (or almost never use) harsh vocals, for example. In Powermetal, it's almost always the high-pitched clean vocals, interchangeable from one band to another. Of course, harsh vocals are predominant in extreme genres but some bands also use more normal vocals in the mix or combinations of screams and growls, etc. Of course, this theory has its flaws. For example, Death Metal can be very complex and technical, yet it is a very stale genre in general these days. As for traditional Heavy Metal, I think it was the starting point but since Metal has changed so much since its early days and branched in every direction, it is almost impossible to innovate in this genre without it becoming something else that would belong to one of the more 'specialized' genres (Powermetal, Thrash, etc, etc...).
---- "Why would we fear death, when life is so much more frightening?"
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| Bad English Tage Westerlund Posts: 62020  |
There are Europiean flower metal as Helloween, Freedom Call and US Power as Iced earth, this band Jag panzer and so on what is good There are only one metal gods , all lads comr from Birmingham BTW I know this band good one, I will check this album out
---- I stand whit Ukraine and Israel. They have right to defend own citizens. Stormtroopers of Death - "Speak English or Die"  I better die, because I never will learn speek english, so I choose dieing
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| Lord_Regnier Posts: 1469 |
Written by deadone on 30.07.2015 at 02:29 Since around the millenia, Powermetal is straying away more and more from 'melodic speed Metal' and has a tendency to lean more towards hard rock and pop music, indeed. It is less and less Metal and more mainstream. Not that I care these days. We have other genres, if we want more Metal stuff.
---- "Why would we fear death, when life is so much more frightening?"
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