Dragonheart

Messiah’s Kiss have been churning out fun, energetic power metal for a few years now and this is their third album – yes, it uses the cover art from that awful Skylark album, but don’t be fooled into thinking this is anything that lame at all. This is a purely old school romp of ass-kicking metal in the vein of Black Sabbath and Dio and any number of other 80s greats. Why wouldn’t you like something like that? I don’t know. Maybe you’re just fucking crazy.

Really, the strength here is singer Mike Tirelli. This man is just outstanding. His voice is incredibly dynamic and fluid, changing almost flawlessly from a high Tony Martin-esque croon to a rough-n’-tumble snarl that aids the album’s more pugilistic moments well. I could pick out individual stand out moments, but really every song has him ripping out some killer vocal hooks that are just a huge delight to listen to. He sounds like he’s doing all this without breaking a sweat and it really is awesome. He does not just sing these songs – he becomes them, wearing them like a second skin and emoting with a ton of bite and ferocity. Every vocal line on here is top notch.

The songs here are either short, fast grinders with face-melting riffs and leads or slower burns that take a little more time, and remind heavily of something off of Black Sabbath’s Headless Cross with a more modern sound. Each song is articulated with smoldering riffs and leads and even some tasteful pinch harmonics on “Open Fire.” They’re all snappy, accessible and they all rock hard like a steel tank to the face. Check out steel-barbed killers like “The Ancient Cries” and “Thunders of the Night,” as well as more melodic tunes like the excellent “Babylon” and the slow-burning “City of Angels,” which is the most like a 80s Sabbath tune. “The Ivory Gate” is the closer, and it’s an epic with elaborate vocal sections and a lot of really first rate melodies and leads. It’s pretty much fucking awesome.

So, yeah, Messiah’s Kiss is a great band and this album hits dead on target as a frigging great metal maelstrom. There are a few tunes like the title track and “Steelrider” that fall flat and keep this from being totally consistent, but even those are still decent enough. If you’re a fan of melodic metal by any stretch, Dragonheart is a must-have.

On any occasion where a band starts off with a winning formula and then decides to wander off to somewhere different, and coming up with inferior results in the process, there are two choices laid before them for their next recording endeavor. They can either continue to pile on the same mistake again and again with hopes that it will get better with time the way bands like Dream Evil, Metalium and Nocturnal Rites have (with less than stellar results), or they can see the error in what they’ve done and jerk the steering wheel back towards where they were originally. Messiah’s Kiss has been fortunate in that they learned their lesson quickly and abandoned the musical dead end that over-cheesed arena power metal ultimately leads to.

“Dragonheart” takes a needed step back towards the faster, heavier brand of power metal that worked so well for this band on “Prayer for the Dying”. There are still some “Metal” moments here and there on the few slower songs on here (“Falcons Cry” in particular), and Mike Tirelli’s voice is still not quite as rugged and vengeful sounding as it was on the debut, but most of what is heard on here is rock solid speed metal goodness. And surprisingly enough, an even larger and more ambitious amount of lead guitar work is offered up on here by Georg Kraft than anything that has been heard out of the band previously. Any doubters of this are encouraged to check out the guitar solo of “Nocturnal”, which is among the best wah pedal driven shred fests I’ve heard from a power metal act in quite a while.

The band has dispensed with any brief intros/overtures and goes right for the jugular with a solid speed metal cooker in “The Ancient Cries”, which has a chorus that sounds pretty similar to the debut’s first fast song “Light in the Black”. Fans of riff oriented speed metal are to be directed to the title track and “Steelrider”, both of which rival anything on Firewind’s first two albums in terms of sheer heaviness. Melodic speed enthusiasts will be pleased with the majestic harmonies heard on “Northern Nights”, which features the closest thing to a squeaky clean vocal performance that you’ll likely get out of Tirelli. There is even some fodder for fans of the Rhandy Rhodes/Zakk Wylde approach to guitar driven metal on “Open Fire”.

Much like the debut, the true treat for the power metal ear is found at the end of the album. Although I still have a slight preference to “Blood of the Kings”, this album’s epic number “The Ivory Gates” rides a very close second for the best song ever put out by Messiah’s Kiss. With the exception of an acoustic section in the middle and a quiet intro, this thing just cooks relentlessly between speed riffs and melodic work. Tirelli really gets into it by about the 3 minute mark and start letting loose those Eric Adams style growls in between the cleaner material he has tended to feature more of lately. In most cases, the changeover from 2 guitarists to 1 is heavily noticeable on songs such as this, but Mr. Kraft lives up to his name and delivers perfect craftsmanship on multiple guitar tracks.

If you own or have heard the debut, this is basically the same masterful metal story with a few occasional “Book of Heavy Metal” moments. It is a given that the self-worship phase that power metal observed in 2004 has taken its toll on many in the scene, but these mad Germans have not been deterred and are poised now to continue delivering their mostly ballsy brand of it. Fans of Running Wild, Accept, Primal Fear, Iron Savior, Paragon and the like, come one, come all and enjoy the bruising epic journey that is “Dragonheart”.