It’s a pretty simple proposition: If you have, at any point in your music listening career, appreciated and enjoyed the works of Helloween, Gamma Ray and/or Primal Fear, then you are going to have a pretty enjoyable time with Evermore‘s Court of the Tyrant King, originally released independently last year but given a welcome re-activation in 2022 by Scarlet Records.

If not, you may as well stop reading now – there’s nothing for you here…

Now we’ve got that out of the way, I have to say that, falling into the former camp, I have indeed been having a riotous old time with Court… Amazingly, Evermore are ‘just’ a trio; somehow they manage to cook up a superbly symphonic sound between the three of them that on the title track is right up there with the recent work of any of the bands I’ve mentioned by way of comparison. They deliver a pretty heavy sound – Johan Karlsson employs a pleasantly raw guitar tone that really carries the overall sound – whilst vocalist Johan Haraldsson has a fine voice, pitched somewhere between Kai Hansen and Ralph Scheepers but with the melodic sensibility of Freedom Call’s Chris Bay; the combination of this, in harness with the energetic drum contributions of Andreas Vikland reaps major benefits for all concerned, not least the listener, who, when presented with shiny, sleek heavy metal like Northern Cross, has little or no alternative but to pitch in and start headbanging furiously!

Naysayers might point out the comparative lack of originality at play here, and it’s true that there’s little or nothing here that you won’t have heard before. And yet, when delivered with the intensity and sheer verve that these guys bring to the table, tracks like the epic See No Evil  – which throws a bit of Iron Maiden into the pot to keep things bubbling away nicely – actually transcend any criticism, inviting the listener instead to simply wallow in the ironclad brilliance on offer -which is an invite I’m pretty eager to accept I must say!



Court of The Tyrant King re-releases on September September 23rd.