Band:	Steel Seal
Album:	Redemption Denied
Style:	Neoclassical power metal
Release date:	December 21, 2010
A review by:	wormdrink414

01. Burn The Sky
02. Time Stood Still
03. Crown Of Thorns
04. Holy Thursday
05. Victory In Black
06. Nevermore
07. Call To Roll
08. Lord Of The Flies
09. Evening Star
10. As Darkness Falls
11. Afterlude In D

Some of the songs on Redemption Denied are just plainly painful. Like the new X-Men movie painful. Like having your eye-lids removed to watch an American Idol marathon painful. Like go back and read your old forum posts painful. They sound fake, contrived, strained, pretentious, uninspired, yap yap yap yap, and characterless. Meanwhile, some of the songs on Redemption Denied are clichéd to John Grisham extremes. And they're appropriately tedious as a result.

But. All that said. Some of the songs on this album are pretty fucking catchy. And I guess that's ultimately what counts. With this type of metal, at least. Despite a few painfully clunky tracks, Denied boasts its share of solid heavy metal songs. And I have, despite my abundance of trveness, been rocking out to it quite a bit lately.

What makes this album average, as opposed to purely shitty, is that Steel Seal executes clichés with a respectable measure of poise. And they deserve credit for that. All of the band members play their instruments competently. The vocalist has a decent range, stumbles a bit, but is always quick to recover. The guitarist is skilled, riffs up some cool riffs, and solos out some cool solos. The drummer knows how to drum. The keyboardist keyboards up some eerie melodies. Etc.

They don't come together frequently enough on this, though. They make it too easy for the listener to focus on one aspect of their music at a time. There's not much dynamism here. When they do play well together, they do so only for short periods of time. The album ends up sounding simultaneously ill-considered and over-planned. And that's a weird impression to make. Probably the only thing that's weird about this release.

So. If you love heavy/power metal, Redemption Denied is worth a quick check out. Otherwise, I'll go out on a limb and say that it's safe to skip.