Tigersclaw
Force of Destiny

Wow! The title track of the second album of German trio Tigersclaw is a piece of magic, a brilliant track that sets up the hope of a wonderful album. Unfortunately Force of Destiny falls very short of delivering such an album, they show flashes of greatness and an equal amount of boring stuff. They kind of do what they did on the debut but more so, this album is a whopping 73 minutes long and consists of many tracks, fifteen to be precise. And while I thought the previous album was great despite being a bit long, this is just too long to be considered anything but average as it has tracks that are really bad and lots of minutes I could do just as well without. I think they could have ditched half the album and by doing so improving it quite a lot.

Think Nightwish and you have a pretty good idea of how these guys sound, female fronted symphonic/power metal with soprano type vocals for most part. Great vocals I should add, but why did they place a worthless track behind the best one they have done? It is a hard one to figure out. But the production is great so it is a really great product from that standpoint, it sounds good even when they make bad songs. The variation is far from enough to keep this album interesting all the way through and the band is at their best when they make faster and catchier songs, mostly the slower songs don’t work.

You could say that it is dynamic, goes from fantastic to awful to great to boring and up and down like an emotional rollercoaster through the insanely long playing time. The title track is a wow-experience as I have already claimed and it is the best track on the album. Tigersclaw is another strong track albeit with a needlessly long and dreary intro. Still of the Night is another track that is memorable to me, and there are a few more that really work while Walpurgis night might be the worst track I have heard in 2019 and there are a few more that does nothing at all for me. The best thing is probably to buy this album digitally and then just throw away half of the songs, if you did that it would go from average to almost fantastic.

Force of Destiny is a bit of a what if; like what if the rest of the album was as great as the title track, then it would have been a hard album to better this year. What if it was shorter, then it would have been better and you can go on like that with the terrible Walpurgis Night or other songs that are about as much fun as watching a bucket of paint dry. And there are other what ifs that would have improved the trio’s second offering that I think sounds almost like they just took everything they had written and committed it to the album without ever doing a selection. A wise lesson for these guys would be to think that they should squeeze the album onto a single vinyl LP, if they had done such a selection for this album I am sure it would have been much better. Now it is just an amazing opener and it goes downhill from there, from brilliant to average in about 73 minutes.

HHHHHHH