Album Review: Masterplan - Metalmorphosis

When a band takes more than a decade off from releasing new music, that says something to me. There are two possibilities that immediately come to mind. As a creator myself, I understand the ebbs and flows of inspiration, so the band might have felt they didn't have anything to say for all that time. There is also a business component where they might not have felt it made sense from a financial standpoint to bother making a new record. In either of those cases, it doesn't present us with cause to have great hope that the switch will be flipped and it will be as if no time at all had passed.

The thing about Masterplan is that they didn't take a break at their height, so they are not only trying to recapture the momentum they had, but reverse the slide back down the mountain. Their first two records were important pieces of power metal in the early 00s, but after Jorn Lande left the group, their stature took a notable hit. Rick Altzi is a veteran for sure, but he is not Jorn, and the band was shrinking before their hiatus.

Their return comes at an interesting time, because I don't see a rejuvenation of power metal at hand at the moment. That would lead me to think their hiatus was a creative decision, which is the more unfortunate of those possibilities. What Masterplan gets right with this record is not reinventing the wheel. This sounds like early Masterplan as we would want them to, if we look back fondly on that period of time. Personally, I have revisited some of that power metal in recent times, and it feels more and more like a phase, and not something that endures.

The problem comes in songs like "Shadow Man", where the composition feels stitched together from spare parts that didn't fit in any other song. The verses don't connect to the choruses, and the guitar solo sounds like a different tempo, so there isn't much cohesive flow to follow through to the end. The hook is solid, but everything about getting there is awkward, and those are the sorts of kinks a record thirteen years in the waiting shouldn't still have.

One of the hardest things to explain is charisma, and that is the key word that comes to mind listening to this album. There was something about this band with Jorn that had charisma, and I don't hear that same thing with Altzi behind the mic. He's hitting the notes, and he has the gravel in his voice, but it doesn't have the same charm to it. If some people have magnetic personalities, so too do voices, and Masterplan is lacking that as an artistic unit, at least to me. They're doing the right things, but it doesn't have 'spark', so to speak.

That being said, there is also a reality that this record isn't that 'classic' debut. There is no "Enlighten Me" or "Headbangers Ballroom" to be found here. None of these songs are as memorable as the band's previous best work, and some songs like "Pain Of Yesterday" are only memorable for how little I remember about them. The personality issues would be a minor thing if the album was hitting me the same way the debut did twenty years ago. I'm a different person, and Masterplan isn't a different band, so we're two ships that have spent too long headed in opposite directions.

Fans of power metal by rote will probably enjoy this record quite a bit. It sounds enough like those days of the power metal revival to scratch that itch if you have it. I don't, other than with my favorite band of that period, so this is more of a reminder to me of a sound I have outgrown than it is a reminder of something I used to love.

I wasn't expecting Masterplan to turn back time and rekindle a passion in me, and I wasn't disappointed. I'm just not that impressed either.