Believe it not, killer power metal doesn’t begin and end with Iced Earth and DragonForce. There’s a less-widely known yet musically superior band out there that will blow the top of your (metal)head off if you give them a chance.
I’m talking, of course, about the mighty Pharaoh, featuring singer Tim Aymar, the guy whose pipes powered Control Denied’s The Fragile Art of Existence, and six-string shredder Matt Johnsen, who is so good that he probably works for NASA.
Melodic and technical to a fault, Pharaoh’s fifth album rides a fine line between heavy-metal radio-friendliness and advanced prog-metal ecstasy. Just when Aymar starts to massage your brain with an insistent vocal line, along comes Johnsen with a dazzling solo to launch your imagination into the stratosphere. Every song is dreamy and defiant, from the ferociously thrashed-up riff frenzy of “The Wolves,” to the nuclear-physics-grade time signatures of “Graveyard of Empires.” The Iron Maiden worship that Pharaoh once wore like a badge of honor is now completely rubbed away, save for a few galloping rhythms—as found on “Castles in the Sky,” for instance.
In sum, the band has achieved a perfect balance of intellectual precision and aggressive tact. Also, Aymar’s lyrics have never sounded more poetic (and less cheesy) than in the savage “Burn With Me,” a song of kinship and fealty like no other.
This article appears in Mar 15-21, 2012.
great review of a very good album and band, but it’s still very unfair to exclude so many other great and hard working bands in the field…. just for one example, if name dropping DragonForce, one is absolutely obligated to tip the hat to many amazing bands who have played a similar speedy, melodic style longer, better, and more intelligently…just one example being Labyrinth, who stole the show at ProgPower USA last year. With the Internet being what it is, Americans have really no excuse any longer to be outwardly or inwardly myopic with music.