Freedom Call – Legend of The Shadowking

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Three years in the making Legend of The Shadowking is a concept album based on Ludwig II, King of Bavaria, is Freedom Call’s seventh album to date, and it turns out their last with founding drummer Dan Zimmermann. A strangely constructed album, the middle three songs are both vastly superior, and strikingly different in terms of style to the rest of the disc, bookened by the power metal equivalent of a medieval jamboree. Quaint harmonies and melodies over disappointingly light guitars characterise the first six and last five tracks, with a lot of trademark up-tempo, melodic, but ultimately stale and forgettable power metal clichés and stock rhythms repeating much of what was covered on the last two albums. In the middle a haunting Under The Spell of The Moon, with gothic rock vocals, is an interesting and unexpected highlight, as are the Kamelot-esque Dark Obsessions and the genuinly heavy The Darkness. Legend of The Shadowking is being hailed in some quarters for its variety and originality, but eleven of the fourteen tracks here are bland retreads of each other, with the possible exception of the closing brace, which sound like parodies of campy 1980s hard rock songs. This album does sound like the band are no longer trying to be something in particular, expressing a new found freedom, so to speak, but much of what’s here doesn’t reflect that liberation in terms of its quality. Points are deserved for trying something different, but its without a great deal of success.

Written by Andy Lye
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