Dragonhammer - The Blood Of The Dragon

*=Staff's pick	Legend* It's War Dragon Hammer Age Of Glory Scream You Kill (Fortuna In Battaglia)* Black Sword Fire Blood In The Sky In Your Eyes

Genre	Power Metal	Max Aguzzi	Vocals
Tracks	10	Max Aguzzi	Guitar
Runningtime	44 Min.	-	Guitar
Label	Elevate Records	Gae Amodio	Bass
Release	30 Jul. 2001	Milko Morelli	Drums
Country	Italy	Alex Valdambrini	Keyboards
Similar artists	---

I don´t know - these guys sure mean well, have a passion for melodic and a bit epic metal....but this is the type of music that has helped dragging the name of Power Metal in the dirt in in the metalscene the past years.
If this kind of music is not well composed and performed, it turns out more than in other genres to be kind of emberrasing.
It starts right away in the first 2 seconds of the opening song where the chorus is being sung acapella, and you for same reason come to think about an old classic called You Give Love A Bad Name made by a certain Bon Jovi.....

And it doesn´t get much better than the opener. The vocals contributes quite a bit to make this sound a bit worse than it actually should, cause singer Aguzzi has troubles keeping a clean note more than on one occasion. Ordinary highpitched, and a bit pretentious vocals.

Musically Dragonhammer tries to play symphonic metal with a lot of keyboardscales and bombastic choirs, and I have to admit that they manage to serve quite a few nice refrains and harmonies here, like in Legend and You Kill (Fortuna In Battaglia), where they show that the potential are there to compose moodful songs that also have good riffs and good groove.

But overall this fall pretty flat to the ground, mainly because of the fact that this simply doesn´t speak much to me. It is all too uninteresting - surely there are good melodies, riffs and some really god refrains here and there, but it goes in to one ear and immediatly out of the other.
The production is thin and "plastic" and feels pretty irritating in the long run and it is in fact power metal, but with too cheap riffs and not much true feeling put into this.

I find it hard to really compare this to any existing band in the same genre, because that might mislead to think that this is just as good, which it is definitely not.
I suggest that you turn elsewhere for italian metal consisting symphonic elements - why not in Vision Divine or Thy Majestie´s direction?