Machine Men - Circus Of Fools

Published Jan. 29 2007

*=Staff's pick	Circus Of Fools No Talk Without The Giant* Ghost Of The Seasons Tyrannize The Shadow Gallery* Where I Stand Border Of The Real World Dying Without A Name* The Cardinal Point

Genre	Heavy Metal	Antony	Vocals
Tracks	9	Jarno	Guitar
Runningtime	42 Min.	J-V	Guitar
Label	Century Media	Eero	Bass
Release	19 Feb. 2007	Jani	Drums
Country	Finland	-	Keyboard
Similar artists	Edguy, Iron Maiden

I was not too impressed by Machine Men's second album Elegies. Well performed but a bit too lame and only enjoyable in parts and for the moment. This, their third full lenght album, is however better.

The general style is the same as on the previous album Elegies (2005), with the difference that you can hear that a couple of years have passed and the songwriting has matured along the way. It is still ordinary heavy metal but while Elegies was very straight forward and simple, this is more interesting with more ingredients.

The vocals are just like before a mix between Bruce Dickinson and Tobias Sammet and while it before was more Dickinson in them, they are nowadays quite more similar to Sammet. They are very good and solid and one of the biggest assets of the band. Musically as well as vocally there are also very strong resemblances to Iron Maiden and Edguy (not surprisingly since Machine Men started as an Iron Maiden cover band), with emphasis on the latter. There is a bit of Maidens progressive- and epicness from their last three albums and there are the more heavy riffs and melodic refrains from the Edguy camp. Put together it is a good blend of somewhat good and dynamic variety and good refrains and those refrains together with the vocals, as earlier mentioned, are what bring this album home safe.

It goes along pretty much in midtempo with the occasional increase in speed in a couple of songs and they are not afraid to throw in the odd thrash-like riff here and there either, which only spice up the whole thing. All in all a good album and I will for sure play it more in the future and I also think I dare saying that this album is slightly better than the recent albums from the bands that Machine Men have gathered their influences from. That sounds better than how it is in reality, though, since I think that both those bands released pretty average albums last year.