Another year, more masked bozos bringing out albums on Scarlet Records…

… Except this time, the bozos in question – Finland’s Dragonknight – turn out to be really rather good. Storm Bringer is an exercise in kitchen sink metal a la Twilight Force, true, but for the most part Dragonknight are a collective who eschew out-and-out bombast in favour of a more measured approach to songwriting that pays dividends every time. In their more epic, cinematic orchestral moments you’ll get hints of Manowar at their most impressively symphonic, but the default setting is meaty, balls-out metal enhanced by simple yet effective playing and a strictly non-histrionic vocal style that really complements the nature of the music.

Astarte Rise, a song that works in folky elements, a Zeppelinesque eye for the bucolic and some very fine power ballad tropes, turns out to be the best song on offer, showing a well-rounded understanding of just what makes an epic metal song burn. It’s superbly thought-out and executed, and deserves all the praise I’m sure is about to be heaped on it in the coming months…

Dead Kings In The Grave is just a bit too quirky for this reviewer, but that’s personal taste as opposed to any real failing in the music itself, but the band redeem themselves immediately with another scorcher, Sword of the Northern Lights, which is a quite superb amalgamation of names you’ll know and love moulded into a fresh, exciting new direction. It’s getting harder and harder to find power metal delivered in any other style other than the rigidly dogmatic, but I genuinely hear something a little bit innovative in the way these shadowy blokes go about their business. There’s definitely the potential for something quite quite special to germinate behind those masks, and I for one am looking forward to see how far Dragonknight can take this…

Legions releases on January 17th.