(Heavy/Power Metal/Female Vocals) Ligeia - Gloria - 2004, FLAC (image+.cue), lossless

That's just the impression I get from this album. Ligeia is a pretty stereotypical German power metal band, and if they had a male vocalist, there probably wouldn't be anything special about them at all. But no, vocalist Petra is most definetly female, and this isn't one of those symphonic "metal" bands that fellate at the altar of Nightwish, this is more heavy metal oriented, very riffy and catchy, with no keyboards to be found anywhere on the palette. It's not very original, as you can tell from the song titles (pretty much all of them have been used by other bands, for album names or song titles), and the music isn't anything too special. But Germany always was a good country for 'back to basics' heavy metal, and this album is an acceptable offering of metal that fans of the genre will find enjoyment in.

Although I do like this album, I can't help but beat it up a bit for the fact that this is the band's third album. They had been around for a good few years and put out a few albums, so why wasn't this one better than it actually is? The production is rather murky, and a clearer, more polished production would definetly benefit stuff like this. And sometimes the riffage gets a bit repetitive and chuggy, but it's not bad compared to what some other bands do. This album basically sounds like a debut record, in sound and in style, and that does not bode well when the band already had two albums and a couple singles before this. I can't even imagine how unpolished those must be.

There's another problem with this disc too. While most good power metal bands have some musical merits, the choruses are often the focal point of songs. A catchy chorus in power metal is almost mandatory, although it should not be the only thing carrying your song on, which it most certainly is here. Most of the songs here are simply boring musically until the soaring chorus comes swooping in, with the riffs being nothing too special, and the solos rather pedestrian compared to the work of bigger bands. "Walpurgisnight", for example, has a fantastic chorus, but everything else about it is just dreadfully dull. Same story for most of the other songs here, which can pretty much be deemed filler. A band carried by their vocalist alone is almost a pop band.

With that said, the best songs here are "Heaven is Hell" with more diverse and varied vocal preformance from Petra, "Beyond the Sky", which has some extremely catchy riffs in the middle, much like something Slough Feg would do, and the fantastic "Wings of Fire", which packs the most energy out of the pack. The title track is also pretty good, with an anthemic, powerful chorus that's probably a lot of fun at live shows. But aside from the choruses, nothing here is memorable, and since the band is 3 albums into their career, I'm going to be a bit harder on this than I normally would. Recommended only if you want to hear something that sounds like early era Edguy without the spark of passion, and with female vocals.