Artist: Xandria
Title: Neverworld’s End
Type: Album
Label: Napalm
Wow. Now this is not what I was expecting when I offered to take something from the growing Goth Frock pile. Wow. I mean rightly or wrongly I’d always considered Xandria to be a rather second division goth metal taste. Kind of nice vocals if a little underpowered with their previous vocalists, and slightly bland tunes a long way from the epic; just another one on the racks. Mea culpa and chomp chomp swallow words. Sorry. This changes all that.
New vocalist, new attitude and from the first moments of Neverworld’s End, this demands attention.
A Prophecy Of Worlds To End comes on in with the traditional keyboards and bursts into a perfect piece of Nightwish bombast with soft but rich vocals before letting the cannons loose. There we have all just stared at the elephant in the room: Nightwish. Hugely symphonic gothic metal with a classically trained female singer and a genuine metal band under the hood with a thundering drummer. Familiar? But here’s the kicker: Where Nightwish have that air of ice and a thick vein of melancholy, Xandria here have fire and an ear rattling explosive sound. Add in a very Teutonic guitar style that is much more aggressive beneath all those keyboards and you’re there. Now I’m not saying they are some slam crazy death metal band, but this is heavy power metal par excellence wrapped in symphonic sounds.
And they now have Manuela Kraller.
Honestly, she is a total revelation. German lady I believe but previously having done some live time with the revolving collective that is Haggard and a Swiss band Forty Shades as well a Finnish choir, but otherwise pretty new to the scene. But when she really lets loose for the first time (on the insanely catchy Valentine, which is both the most Nightwish cloned and the most defiantly Teutonic metal track all at once) you realise you are not listening to girly metal. This is a woman not some fragile waif, and on the strength of this she also knows metal very well and loves it. No faking or learning about it as she goes along, it’s in the blood. It’s her phrasing that does it. The tone and the power are damned close to fellow classicist Tarja Turunen, perhaps a touch sharper at the edges and a little less full throttle at the moment but her phrasing and expression are for me ahead. She has the control at softer levels to drip spite or offer pleading and, shock horror, even the odd touch of playfulness.
There’s a Lady Macbeth commanding haughtiness to The Blood On My Hands, a worshipful tone on Euphoria, a seductive malevolence on the stomping Soulcrusher. Just a real vocal personality, a prospective metal queen and if she has half the stage command as she does a voice and presence in front of a camera then she could be mesmerizing. Don’t let her escape guys, please.
There is a nice variety of sound here too. Epic closer The Nomads Crown weaves some middle eastern influences into the glorious choral backdrop, A Thousand Letters adds a folk feel and shows the remarkable flexibility of Ms. Kraller’s voice as she adopts a suitable, soft and delicate style to the slow lilting song. Call Of The Wind mixes fiddle and brass into an anthemic, crowd sing along that you’d just love to see them duet with Turisas. But it all flows as an album and is just so much galloping, booming fun.
Back to the elephant I am painfully aware that many will regardless of the differences dismiss this as a Nightwish clone but as a Nightwish fan myself (yep, the truth is out) they really are fire and ice. Xandria burn. The songwriting here has the feel of a band suddenly let loose with all the cannons they’d ever wished for and realise what a sound they have a talent for. Even the main ballad The Dream Is Still Alive works.
It will not win over any symphonic metal haters, but what would? All I can say is that I have hugely demanding standards for this sort of thing, and I haven’t seen a band come so fully to life since Wishmaster blew a commercial hole through metal.
Not groundbreaking, maybe, but fiery passion and dramatic, overblown symphonic metal doesn’t come much better than this. I reckon they’ve just kicked their way into the first division.
Wonderful.
(8.5/10 Gizmo)
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