I don’t know why Delain don’t get mentioned in the same breath as their chosen genre’s symphonic masters more often, after all they tick all the boxes – big songs, fantastic female vocalist, sweeping melodies with Melodic Metal underpinning: it’s seemingly all there.
Opener ‘Hands of Gold’ is grandly constructed, sweeping and immediate and actually getting me quite excited until the pointless dirty vocals kick in around the three minute mark and you think maybe that’s why people feel Detain are ‘followers’ rather than leaders.
That is of course completely unfair and ‘The Glory and the Scum’ which follows and eschews the unwritten convention of the ‘beauty and the beast’ dirty vocal is far more powerful. ‘Suckerpunch’ too packs some ‘oomph’ but fans will have heard it before from the Lunar Prelude EP earlier this year. It’s a great anthemic tune and one of the best here.
For all its strengths though ‘Moonbathers’ does at times get a little ‘theatrical’ in a cloying way like on ‘Chrysalis – The Last Breath’ which for all Charlotte Wessel’s vocal prowess does come across a little ‘Lloyd Webber’… and that really is my issue with most Symphonic rock – its inability to not take itself seriously. Ironically it’s another ‘big production’ piece – ‘Turn the Lights Out’ that gives the album one of its best moments.
Elsewhere there’s a mixed bag: ‘Fire with Fire’ is a fine spirited rocker, the simplest most straightforward track and most immediate here, it’s also our favourite. ‘Danse Macabre’ on the other hand suffers from an annoying almost glib yodelled refrain that just annoys. The Queen cover ‘Scandal’ is decent enough though it’s never been a song that ever featured high in my list of Queen favourites, and the album closes with ’The Monarch’ a song that seems strangely unfinished.
At the end of the day this feels like a ‘safe’ album for Delain, appealing to fans, but as we said earlier there’s a sense of ‘following’ rather than leading from the front.
A deluxe edition of the album will contain six additional tracks.
