Power metal is a bit of a double edged sword. On one hand it’s innate overblown aesthetic and inherent catchiness make it pretty easy to get in to on the outset, on the other it can often get cheesier than the unwashed underpants of a freckled basement dweller three days after his pornhub premium subscription is renewed and that level of cheese can get sickening remarkably quickly. It’s fair to say that I’ve often found the genre utterly unbearable but I guess I’ve been warming up to it in recent years at the same speed at which one boils a swimming pool with a road flare. But one must remember that cheese lovingly pasteurised and paired with the appropriate wine can be a pleasurable experience.
With this in mind, I dove into Suite 226, the latest release by bizarrely named ‘Serious Black’, (If that’s not inviting a comment about Harry Potter’s godfather I don’t know what is), and the final chapter in the band’s opus of a mental patient trapped in both a small room and the confines of his own dissolved mind. Comparisons to genre cornerstones like Helloween are validated from the get go. Soaring synths, acrobatic higher register vocals, power chords galore and noodly leads make up the bulwark of Serious Black’s sound.
Things kick off somewhat lacklustre with opener ‘Let It Go’, whose bizarre and frankly irritating vocal delivery through the verse and the lack of any real hook diminish the effect of the killer riffs lurking underneath. ‘Solitude Etude’ is where my brain switches on like a smack addict hooked jump cables up to my ballsack and he can only have his next fix once I’ve appropriately broken the sound barrier. Epic, winding progressions and stunning vocal delivery are present throughout, a theme which carries on through into album highlight ‘Castiel’, anthemic ‘Way Back Home’, the eurobeat driven ‘We Still Stand Tall’, balladic ‘Come Home’ and album namesake. All these tracks manage to balance the cheese with progressive songwriting and hook laden vocal passages, and I found myself somewhat enthralled by it.
However, it wouldn’t be a pack of smarties without finding a cockroach at the bottom of the tube. ‘Fate of All Humanity’ is a cringe fest whose euro-pop key change chorus is vomit inducing at best, and ‘Heaven Shall Burn’; a pedestrian meander down a particularly generic street where every other house a dog runs out and shits on your sneakers.
Suite 226 is a bit of a mixed bag. The high points are brilliantly written hugely catchy and thoroughly enjoyable modern power metal anthems while the low points are as fulfilling as eating your own earwax. Fans of the genre and indeed the band will likely find it much to their taste but to the average outsider the cheese can be somewhat impenetrable like you’re trapped forever at the center of a twelve foot tall babybell.
6/10
