I told myself that since I'd been shoveling all of my power metal promos into my dump-feature lately, that the next one to roll through would get a full review in order to keep things balanced, but Horizons Edge's third album here is making me regret my decision somewhat, because this is, in a way, wholly indicative of my overall problem with modern power metal nowadays.
What I mean by that is that the individual parts here are all excellent. I have absolutely zero qualms with how these songs are constructed and performed. Let the Show Go On is a very proggy take on Stratovarius styled power metal, with loads of pummeling double bass that frequently break into odd, off-kilter rhythms, wild and flailing keyboard solos, frequent shifts in tempo and mood, and soaring vocals that also act as a punch to the gut. On a surface level, everything is on the up-and-up. There are some real bangers here like the opening barnburner, "A New Day Will Dawn", "In a Moment", and the ever-popular cover choice, Bonnie Tyler's "Holding Out for a Hero". It sounds like Lost Horizon, Angra, and Dragonforce all got together for a supersized writing session, and that's awesome.
But of course there's a catch, and I've said it a thousand times by now, but Let the Show Go On falls victim to the Achilles Heel that seemingly all but one or two power metal albums per year have fallen into ever since Gamma Ray and Rhapsody fell off their games. Once again, modern power metal routinely delivers great tracks hidden in mediocre albums. Those tracks I mentioned are all very good, but the rest of this album is just a blur of meaningless noise. It's very, very dense, with a metric fuckload of things going on at any given moment (this is where the Dragonforce influence comes in), but like the Star Wars prequels, what the hell is the point of any of it? Pick out any given ten second snippet here and you'll likely be floored with fretboard wizardry and keyboard whirlwindery, but it never actually feels intense. It's just emotionally empty, a veritable avalanche of proggy riffs and hooks that routinely fail to land. It's merely sound that evokes nothing at all, easily fading into the background and doing fuck all to grab you outside of the handful of good songs.
The one and only consistently interesting thing is Kat Sproule's vocal performance. She takes a very androgynous approach to her voice, completely eschewing both of the typically "female" styles that saturate the style. She bucks both the operatic cooing of Tarja Turunen or Simone Simons and the throaty ferocious wailing of Doro Pesch or Noora Louhimo. Nah, instead she just sings in a very typical power metal style, her femininity becoming a total non-factor in the band's identity, instead presenting themselves as a solid, cohesive power metal unit instead of having her emulate one of the two most influential women in the style and making her vocals louder than everything else by a magnitude of sixty. And this works solely because she has a great voice. She's very reminiscent of Timo Kotipelto, and this is exactly the kind of band she belongs in. Make it heavier or more symphonic and it just wouldn't work. She's by far the highlight.
Unfortunately she can't save the boring instrumentals, and on the whole Let the Show Go On is simply not worth seeking out. There's a lot of stuff here but almost none of it lights the fire in my belly that the best bands in the genre do. Certainly doesn't help that, like apparently every power metal album must be by law, it runs nearly an hour long. I just do not understand the incessant need to cram in as much material as humanly possible on every album, because this shit does not hold interest well enough to justify the length.
RATING: 48%
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