The trouble with heavy metal veterans Dream Evil is that they’ve forgotten about excitement. It’s not until the opening of track five on this ten track affair, Fight In The Night, that they remember how to ratchet up the drama, and that might well be too late for noncoms with no skin in the DE game.

That’s not to say that the first four tracks on the album stink – far from it. However, I’m sure Dream Evil weren’t striving for ‘competent’ when they decided to release their first album in over half a decade, and that’s unfortunately what tracks like Lightning Strikes reek of. Competence.

Opening list song Metal Gods will raise a smile, but it’s really not until the band switch to the mid-paced, Accept-meets-Primal Fear crunch of Fight In The Night and the quite superb Masters of Arms that things really start to hot up. The latter, in particular, hits that sweet spot which all bands who use the eighties as a template search for; Big, brooding riffs, pulsing bass, colossal drums, sing-it-shout-it choruses, solos you’ll be whistling till the Cows come home… heavy metal just how we like it, in other words – but for a lot of the rest of the time Metal Gods seems to be a treatise of the triumph of perspiration over inspiration, which is a shame.

Born In Hell sounds like something Judas Priest might have passed on during the Ripper years, although it does come equipped with Markus Fristedt‘s best solo on the album; Then, just as you are ready to consign the album to the ‘won’t listen to this again’ bin the band rip out an absolute stormer in the shape of the Scorpions-styled rocker Insane, an instant classic that might well be worth the price of admission on it’s own.

A frustrating listen overall then, with the second half definitely outpointing the first, and your threshold of tolerance for the mundane might be the dependent factor on whether you purchase this album or not.

Metal Gods releases on July 26th.