Fairyland - Score to a New Beginning (2009)^{Release ID: 18452}

My continued exploration of the symphonic/power metal genre gleans a mixture of both interesting and unfortunately repulsive albums as I traverse the waters.  Score to a New Beginning falls somewhere around the interesting mark initially and although it never dips away into the repulsive category highlighted above it doesn’t hold up well over the duration of the record.  Whilst there’s no doubt that the formula the band uses more than gets them to the finish line, it falls far short of warranting description of being a “winning” formula.

Despite a multitude of sounds and instrumentation being active on the record the mix for the large part is surprisingly good.  The keys and strings do feel like they are jostling for space at times but they don’t lose one another at the expense of building atmosphere and drama.  The same cannot be said unfortunately for the vocals which find themselves bobbing along in the tide and on more than one occasion ending up under the waves of clashing cymbals, stabs of keys and riffs from guitars.  They aren’t helped by the fact that although they often sound powerful enough they struggle to add an edge to things when needing to sound more aggressive and just generally more metal than rock.

The tracks themselves do suffer from a very formulaic structure of verse, chorus, keyboard solo, guitar solo and then rinse and repeat.  Not that you can fault the musicianship here, more the songwriting capabilities are questionable at best.  That having been said, there’s some genuine stick your chest out moments as you listen; where the epic structures come to life and you are cast into the theatre and drama of scenarios like the artwork.  The balance of the symphonia works well enough at times to give me hope for the record but overall the sense of being underwhelmed is difficult to fight off.