Crylord – Blood of The Prophets

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Crylord is an all-star neo-classical power metal project put together by Polish guitarist Boguslaw Balcerak and this debut album has been four years in the making due to the amount of time it took Balcerak to find a singer or singers capable of doing justice as he saw it to his material. Indeed everything on Blood of The Prophets was written between 2008 and 2009, and the music itself was all recorded in the Spring of 2009. Balcerak had intended to find a Polish singer to join Crylord, but was unable to locate anyone he felt was good enough in the two years prior to recording the songs, so he sent them to his three favourite vocalists on the off chance and they all accepted his invitation to participate in the project. Those three vocalists are the much-traveled Carsten Schulz, and ex-Yngwie Malmsteen pair Mark Boals and Göran Edman. With those three on board, and a guitarist of Balcerak’s undoubted calibre, Blood of The Prophets really should be a veritable tour de force. Unfortunately, its lack of coherent flow makes it little more than an ordinary Malmsteen-clone. The aspect of the Crylord project which could have given it a unique identity was the involvement of three top-drawer singers all playing off against each other over the course of the disc. But instead, as most of the time they are each singing alone (Edman twice, Boals once, Schulz four times), it just plays like a compilation of songs those three happen to be on. All of them are well played examples of neo-classical power metal, but with nothing particularly special about them. The only song which stands out as a genuinely strong track is the brooding eight minutes of Valley of The Dead, featuring Schulz. On one occasion, Face of Destiny, Boals and Schulz both appear, but there’s no interplay to speak of, rendering the gesture pointless. It’s not until the final two tracks where all three vocalists are involved at once, and even then closer The Healing Hands of Destruction is a fairly generic romp. Only the magnificent When The Time Has Come at track 11 flashes a glimpse of what this album could have achieved; all three voices combining brilliantly. A glimmer of hope for a follow-up then. But only a glimmer.

Written by Andy Lye
More: 2011, Albums, Power Metal, Quick.Play Reviews, Crylord