Hyborian Steel-Blood, Steel And Glory

After dealing with waves of pervasive death and thrash metal bands, I thought I'd try something different. No doubt, Hyborian Steel provided me with such a thing. Hyborian combine the heroicism of power metal with the ridicolous jumpiness of heavy metal in order to form ''Epic Power Metal'', something which you don't see quite often. Indeed at first, ''Blood, Steel and Glory'' had an amazingly epic feel, roaming over the warfaric lyrics and atmosphere to add additional spunk. Repeatedly slitening to this record enables the listener to finally comprehend the atmopshere, and finally come to cunclusion that Hyborian Steel's style is also quite pervasive, but it's just so fun to toy with that one can simply not care.

The music reflects the lyrics quite excellently, providing both a heroic and barbaric sound for the listener to acquire. The vocals, which may seem irritative and annoying at first actually make up the key bases of the album, adding a tremendous backbone to the album, and thus not only allowing the riffs to sound epic, but also giving omnipotency to the music to increase effectiveness during accents. Most of the songs deal around more epic and comprehensible structures, covering the music with thick epicness and decorating the riffs with harmonically inclining lead sections. So many guitars gather around in the solos that the music turns into ''happy metal'' all of a sudden, the climax of epicness. Of course, nobody said that the music would be all cakes and lollipop. ''Acqilonian Battlecry'' leans slightly towards the more barbaric side of power metal, with its striking riffs, herpic breakdowns and thanks to the atmosphere which acts like a battle scene. But the real track that attains the barbaric sound is ''the Mountain Of Crom'', a vicious track it is, especially during its first half, the song purely concentrates on all things savage and warfaric about power metal. After some time, the spikes of savagery do melt down slightly, but I could only care. The band have also put a versatike cover of Cirith Ungol's ''War Eternal'', that just follows a very similar path as the band.

The vocals are annoying even though they are supportive, and that's all I can point out. The delivery of the music on ''Blood, Steel and Glory'' is magnificent, especially during the first few songs. If you are hunting for something different than the widespread sound of death, thrash and black, then I can't seem to understand why you wouldn't want this album. Safely combines power with heavy, supports the structure and accent at all times, provides an epic atmosphere and inserts in so much melody that sometimes I cease to comprehend the mash up of notes. A new wave of heavy metal bands are coming your way, and with bands such as Midnight and Hyborian Steel leading the front row, there's no stopping this contemptous wave of invading heavy metal monsters.

Highlights:
Aquilonian Battlecry
The Mountain of Crom
The Black Hand Of Set
(The Cirith Ungol cover is great too but not an original)

Rating: 83,5%