Album Review: Iron Savior - Skycrest

It's nearly the end of the year, and yes, that means I feel like I've heard everything 2020 has to offer. So what better way to play into that theme than to go back to the heart of power metal, where little has changed since I found the genre almost twenty years ago. The tropes and cliches are the same as they have always been, which is why fans move in and out. Some of us want nothing more than a dose of familiarity, while some of us get tired of the same thing again and again.

Iron Savior stands out for another reason. Their blend of vocals gives a remarkable sense of Blind Guardian to the proceedings. That will interest many people, I'm sure, but not me. If I'm being honest, I have never gotten into Blind Guardian. I've heard enough of their albums, but something about their delivery (or maybe the obsession with Tolkien) has never appealed much to me.

It has always struck me as weird how eras of music feature a host of singers who all take on the same vocal tone. It must be intentional, since I can't see how physiology would explain why singers of the 60s, 70s, 80s, and so on all have unique characteristics. There must be a degree to which these singers are trying to copy what is already popular, which seems all the more likely when we're talking about a tone this unique.

That's not to say Iron Savior is nothing but a Blind Guardian clone. Across this album, they do a fine job of writing traditional power metal that hits the epic choirs necessary to make this music what it should be. A lot of the time leading up to those moments are the standards chugging riffs and drums that don't stand out much as their own compositions, but the choruses are the wonderfully huge and rousing affairs that makes good power metal such cheesy fun. Pull up a tankard of mead and have some fun.

But for every good there is a bad, and in this case it comes in "Hellbreaker". It's an otherwise fine song, but it goes too far for my taste when sound effects of what I assume is a laser gun fight are included. This album isn't tongue-in-cheek enough to get away with that sort of thing. It's a distraction, and it takes away from what was shaping up to be an aggressive and raging song. Instead, it winds up sounding stupid.

The rest of the album does what is needs to, and serves as a fine platter of power metal in that particular style. If the Blind Guardian orchestral album left a band taste in your mouth, this will help cleanse it, but it also suffers from clone syndrome. I know Iron Savior has been around for quite a while now, but when their sound is so obviously copying someone else, it's hard to get excited about anything they do. I get why they exist, but I would rather hear who these people are, and not who they want to be. They show enough talent to make me think it would be more enjoyable to hear an original Iron Savior, and not a second Blind Guardian.