Dream Evil
Six
Century Media Records
2017
Dream Evil began life as a project of producer Fredrik Nordström, who fancied forming a Power Metal band, but didn’t seem able to get permanent members interested… during holidays in Greece he met a then young and not terribly famous (at the time) Gus G. and they joined forces and Niklas Isfeldt, who had worked with Nordström, doing backing vocals for Hammerfall joined along with Peter Stålfors on bass, who was his band mate. Quite famously the band featured multi-instrumentalist and multi-band guy Snowy Shaw for the first few albums, since replaced by Pat Power on drums…
Nowhere near as productive as in their first few years, with some four albums in seven years, they managed to produce only two in more than a decade and frankly this should come as no surprise. While expertly produced and pretty competently performed, Dream Evil’s “Six” sounds as generic and cookie cutter as anything.
Niklas sounds like Scheepers, if he had his balls caught by a door, while the songs, despite good riffs, are plagued by toe curling lyrics and highly predictable and uninspiring musical ideas that fail to get the listener really involved. There’s not character in the sound of the band that will often cause deja-vu due to the lazy songwriting and the obvious Priest (“Creature of the Night” for instance pretty much copies “Hellion” quite closely) and Gamma Ray similarities…
While there’s nothing “terribly” bad about Dream Evil, there’s hardly also anything to write home about and when that happens to something that you profess to love, then there’s a problem… and I don’t think it has to do with me not liking “heavy metal”; it probably has to do with the material on “Six” being as predictable as having a song called “Six Hundred and 66”…. oh you dirty devils…
Damnation… this bored me so badly towards the end that I could not even bring myself to give it a “6”…
Nowhere near as productive as in their first few years, with some four albums in seven years, they managed to produce only two in more than a decade and frankly this should come as no surprise. While expertly produced and pretty competently performed, Dream Evil’s “Six” sounds as generic and cookie cutter as anything.
Niklas sounds like Scheepers, if he had his balls caught by a door, while the songs, despite good riffs, are plagued by toe curling lyrics and highly predictable and uninspiring musical ideas that fail to get the listener really involved. There’s not character in the sound of the band that will often cause deja-vu due to the lazy songwriting and the obvious Priest (“Creature of the Night” for instance pretty much copies “Hellion” quite closely) and Gamma Ray similarities…
While there’s nothing “terribly” bad about Dream Evil, there’s hardly also anything to write home about and when that happens to something that you profess to love, then there’s a problem… and I don’t think it has to do with me not liking “heavy metal”; it probably has to do with the material on “Six” being as predictable as having a song called “Six Hundred and 66”…. oh you dirty devils…
Damnation… this bored me so badly towards the end that I could not even bring myself to give it a “6”…