The only thing more epic than tales of old battles are power metal songs about tales of old battles. We all know I have a huge skeleton in my closet in the shape of a huge dragon slain by Ronnie James Dio that represents my love for power metal. Not too long ago I compared some of the strangely named bands to my MP3 collection. I was delighted to find I had a few songs from compilation cds from
Funnily enough I found Ensiferum in a folk-metal compilation and again in a viking metal list. and had a few Kamelot songs from a while back. I also decided to check out:
On the Wacken page, Ensiferum are described as battle metal. The two songs I have on my playlist are Token Of Time and Guardians Of Fate off the self titled album released in 2001. They play a speedy brand of power metal and the vocals jump between the clear chanting often associated with say, irish ballads and whatnot, to some really nice metal growling vocals. The guitars play a great style of folk-sounding tunes and I really enjoy it. If it sounds interesting to you, give them a look.
Kamelot are a band that have done their time in ye olde metal circuit since the early 90s and play a bit of progressive metal and use a whole array of instruments to make a huge melodic sound. Although the band had success their real breakthrough was with ‘The Black Halo’. I actually quite like what I have heard because it’s a lot of fairly simple melodies, but done well to get such an epic sound. Speaking of epic, check out their video for March of Mephisto. Invisible sandwich at 2:10.
Sturm Und Drang aren’t really power metal as such, I just picked them from a Harry Potter-esque sounding name. I was looking for another folk sounding band, but I was pretty happy to find another band that would be more akin to Airbourne than the other folky metal I picked out. The myspace page only has a couple of samples, and the boys do look very young, and I hate to say it, a touch emo, but geez, they rock and rock hard. They only released their debut last year and they are very old school rock/metal. I can’t say too much about them because, well there isn’t much around about them. These guys could very well be finding their way into my usual listening very soon. Fucking rawk!
Sabaton was a band I pretty much chose to look at because sabatons are parts of armour and well, you can’t slay dragons withour armour, so you can see where I went from there. First thing I thought of was, holy camoley, this band is fronted by Tim Silvia. Once I realised how stupid that was, I was treated to some more awesome epic battle metal. These guys will be yet another one to add to the awesome power metal list. Although they don’t “seem” to take in as many instruments as other bands of the power genre, they still use primitive drum beats and ‘yelling’ vocals that will no doubt give the crowd a perfect opportunity for some synchronised headbanging.
