Doro, metal queen indeed, is less than a year older than me. Considering how long I’ve been listening to her that is a sobering realisation. I have immense respect for her as an artist and a person – she has carved out a career starting in a time that was, to put it mildly, even worse than it is now for women and doubly for women who were determined to stick to their guns. She has remained true to her loves, her beliefs and has managed the tricky balance of been incredibly generous with herself towards fans and yet kept her personal life locked away so she has a place to go and to recharge. She has a core of fans who probably rival some Maiden fans for blind devotion, but she also has fans like myself who are… a bit more objective. I say all this because for the first thing to recall for me is that her album career has been at best very patchy. Very. Angels Never Die? Machine II Machine? And the last album five year back Forever Warriors, Forever United was, in retrospect despite my reasonable review a big mistake. Just like Use Your Illusions there’s one fantastic album fighting to get out but buried under bloat.
The second thing with Doro album is that you have to accept the content of the English language songs. The lyrics will be stuffed to bursting seams with the words strong, proud, fight, true, stand, belief, right, strive to the point that any meaning is utterly lost. And at the moment the album titles will be as well. And there will be at least one utterly bland ballad. Or two. Three if you’re really unlucky and all interchangeable (the last one that stuck with me was ‘It Still Hurts’, the duet with Lemmy.)
Sometimes it works beautifully. Fear No Evil and Raise Your Fist were corkers. Head rattlers, fist pumpers and singalongs galore. Others not so much. And the sight of a fifteen track album with an extra FIVE ‘bonus songs’ made me a bit queasy to be honest.
It starts with an intro masquerading as a song ‘Children Of The Dawn’. A slow brooding song which is actually a fine power ballad as opener, bringing a swell of emotion and of course the first time you hear her voice you kinda fall in love with it all over again. It only really gets going as the head rattler you want with ‘Fire In The Sky’ which does exactly that – fast, melodic heavy metal with a great hook and a real sense of urgency. We then get the first guest appearance in a cover of ‘Living After Midnight’ with Mr Halford himself. Hey it’s a fine cover even if the notion of healthy living Doro on an uncontrolled city all night binge is a stretch…
And in comes the ballad. ‘All For You’.. Nah, just kidding. It rises out of the maudlin beginning into a genuine hard rolling, fast rocking metal song. Four songs in and we’re good. Looking very good. ‘Lean Mean Rock Machine’ doesn’t raise the bar, but equally it’s doesn’t drop it either with a nice low down chugging riff straight out of the 80s with a 2023 production.
‘I Will Prevail’ is probably the first filler. It’s OK, not bad just forgettable to be honest. But the short song ‘Bond Unending’ with Sammy Amara from Broilers is actually damned fantastic. Their voices work so well together and the song is hungry and urgent with a great chorus. One I’d love to see them both do live.
‘Time For Justice’ is just pretty typical Doro. Again not bad just so-so and you are left with no idea what injustice she is railing against. And then we get the actual ballad, ‘Fels In Der Brandung’ which nine songs in is an OK positioning. Just as always it’s swamped with strings and keyboards. I mean fine you get Doro’s superb voice but it does zero for me. It’s followed up by a power ballad though (well kind of) in ‘Love Breaks Chains’ which is pretty much missable too.
Doro almost rediscovers her gearbox on ‘Drive Me Wild’ though. A nice slow build to a cool chorus. It’s more a bridge song though, to a harder sound. ‘Rise’ is it but, again it’s just OK and never really hits the spot. And back we go to the ballads with ‘Best In Me’ which isn’t.
‘Heavenly Creatures, song 14 by this point, sounds deceptively heavy but only considering the preceding five songs.
And the album proper ends with a cover of ‘Total Eclipse Of The Heart’, again with Rob Halford. Shockingly his voice works really well on this but frankly I’m not exactly a huge fan of the song and the arrangement of the typical Steinman rising power vocal section is way off.
There are the five bonus songs but as they are bonuses and not really part of the album I’ll pass on those. But suffice to say I’d have kicked out two of the ballads and put ‘Warlocks And Witches’, ‘Horns Up High’ and a rather fine cover of ‘The Four Horsemen’ in the album proper and ditched the rest (though I suspect Metallica fans might disagree with my opinion of ‘…Horsemen’.)
So in most respects then this a Doro album with all the glory and the errors I expect. It’s too long even without the bonus tracks, too much filler and too many ballads that derail the momentum built by the first seven.
It’s no ‘Raise Your Fist’ then, but it’s Ok and it is Doro and it’s better than yet another bloody compilation…If you’re a constructively critical fan it would probably be a pass if not for the first five songs and ‘Bond Undending’. There is a good 9 song playlist to be made from it with the bonus tracks though.
(6.5/10 Gizmo)
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