Eternity's End: The Fire Within (2016)

I have been covering a lot of bands that inhabit the darker corners of heavy metal recently.  Brutal thrash metal bands like Blood Feast, filthy and Satanic death metal bands like Vital Remains, cold black metal bands like Uada, etc.  Of course there are much more melodic styles of metal, such as power metal.  Unfortunately, finding decent new power metal bands is not nearly as easy for reasons that have never been quite clear to me.  Maybe it's just me though.  It is somewhat telling that in the last year, the only power metal bands I have covered were Sonata Arctica and Visigoth.  Only Visigoth is relatively recently-formed.

One day I was able to find some decent power metal recommendations from someone and went about trying to find the releases.  Which leads me to German group Eternity's End.  Germany has always been one of the leading exports of power metal from the very beginning.  After all, Helloween, Running Wild and Blind Guardian were all born in Germany.  Eternity's End play a very fast-paced style of power metal.  The best reference points are probably the bombastic melodies of Dragonforce, mixed with the pop sensibilities of Firewind, and the progressive tendencies of Symphony X all thrown together in a blender. 

Eternity's End is something of a supergroup.  The guitarist is Christian Münzner who has previously served with groups like Defeated Sanity, Necrophagist and Obscura.  Sort of odd to find a tech death metal guitarist in a power metal band, sure, but he is fantastic on this release.  Most of the other members have also spent time in similar groups.  Yet these technical death metal musicians make it work.  The biggest impact of these members is in the virtuosic riff work and solos.  Münzner absolutely shreds throughout the entire release.  There are some damn good keyboard solos as well.

The songs throughout are damn impressive.  They are catchy as all hell with terrific hooks and shredding guitar work.  The lyrical content is typical fare for the genre.  Fantasy themes ("Demonblade" and "Twilight Warrior") fit in alongside horror literature ("The Dark Tower" and "the Fall of the House of Usher") and glorious warfare ("Eagle Divine").  So yeah, the album definitely has the typical power metal cheese factor, but when the music is this damn good, it is very easy to overlook.

This is one of the best power metal albums over the last several years.  All of the musicians are absolutely top-notch and the songwriting is extremely impressive as well.  These songs really stick with the listener long after the album is over.  Power metal is probably one of the most difficult metal genres to really get right, but this collection of technical death metal musicians pull it off.  Eternity's End did release another album last year, but I have not yet checked it out.  It will be interesting to see what this band decides to do in the future.