“Sinner’s Blood is a powerful new melodic metal band from Chile. Featuring a soon to be household name in James Robledo on lead vocals and producer and multi-instrumentalist Nasson crafting the songs and playing guitar, The Mirror Star is a must hear for fans of epic, powerful, heavy metal.”
A ballsy info-text for a band who basically just got started. If they had nothing else, they’d at least have the attitude of a famous rock band. But I have to admit, that if you have as many catchy tunes on your debut record, as they have on this album, you are allowed to be a little cocky. Somehow they blend the edgy part old school hard rock with the epicness and melodic, surefooted catchiness of good power metal.
I thought long and hard on how I should formulate this next paragraph, but then I decided, to just write what I wanted to write when I first heard this track: The Mirror is by far the best album-opener I heard out of a 2020 album up until now. Hell, it can even stand its ground against some legendary openers, like Iron Maiden’s Aces High or Motörhead’s Ace of Spades (maybe it’s just the euphoria speaking. At this point I really can’t tell). In-your-face guitar licks, paired with a simple, yet perfect vocal melody, plus a little “cheese” (the cliche lyrics) on top.
The big drawback with beginning an album with such a phenomenal song, is that the record peaks at the beginning, and it sadly doesn’t reach this height again. Don’t get me wrong though. There are still plenty of great tracks to come. Phoenix Rise loses hardly any momentum and rocks on, until the intro of Never Again takes a slower approach, yet the song still delivers the goods. The first track, that I felt was a little mediocre, was Remember Me. But while writing this review, I caught myself low-key headbanging to this song. So who am I to call this song mediocre?
The Path of Fear and Kill or Die are again two bangers, that would probably bring your blood to the boiling point, if you’d ever play them in direct succession. Good thing Forever is between them. It’s that one ballad, every power metal-record is seemingly obliged to have. The track is far from being a bad song, it just sounds a little by the numbers.
In its second half, The Mirror Star loses a little of its hard rock edge, and becomes more of a full blown heavy metal-record, yet it stays strong with songs like The Hunting and Awakening.
The info-text I got send for this review ends with: “Sinner’s Blood is simply the most awesome melodic metal album of 2020, revealing to the world the talents of some of the most outstanding musicians on the scene.” Well I can’t claim to have heard all melodic metal albums that came out this year. So I can neither confirm, nor dispute that statement. All I can say about this album, is that even if you only remotely like heavy or power metal, you probably gonna love this record.
I’ll go now and listen to The Mirror on repeat ’till I can’t stand it anymore (that’s just what I did with Aces High and Ace of Spades by the way).
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I like music. All of it. Except for schlager… And ballermann. Oh boy do I hate ballermann.
