Sentinel Daily editor Scott Adams usually asks for around three hundred and fifty words for an album review, but after repeated exposures to Chasing The Dragon, the new album from US power metal expositors Helms Deep, I’m confident I can do the job in far fewer. So here goes…

THIS ALBUM IS ABSOLUTELY BLOODY PERFECT.

Anything other than this is simply over egging the pudding, and you really don’t need to know more before heading out and pre-ordering the thing, but for the sake of convention and because I don’t want to receive an ear-bashing from the man at the top, Let me expand a bit more.

In simple terms, what I said above is irrefutable. This is a band that knows just what it takes to weave sonic tapestries of pure gold, seismic blasts of brilliance only the detonation of a thousand suns could produce… or indeed outshine. You get the picture. At one moment – the superb title track, for instance – it’s just heads down mayhem, at another, and I’m looking at the utterly jaw dropping extravaganzas Craze of the Vampire or Red Planet here, the band take on the greats of prog metal and, well, show them how it’s done, basically.

The chugging Cursed shows yet another side – the side where the band synthesises the best of eighties American radio metal and spits out a perfect nugget of same minutes later – but really you know that the musicians involved here are so accomplished you could shout a few reference points at them and they’d come up with something better than the original notion within half an hour.

Seriously, they are that good, and, whilst you can’t underplay the influence of the band’s main progenitor, vocalist Alex Sciortino, in the success of the project, you also have to accept that without the presence of bassist John Gallagher from Raven, Helms Deep would be a very different beast indeed. His bass work throughout is exemplary – in fact it’s better than that, it’s often otherworldly, and the way he roves under the riffs and leads of the guitarists opens up new dimensions for songs only the crew of the Starship Enterprise have so far encountered. On top of that, his vocals bolster Sciortino’s at all the right points to provide a fabulous counterpoint to the lead singer’s more visceral offerings. These two work perfectly together, and when you throw in the undisputed talents of drummer Hal Aponte, who here throws his hat into the ring for the title of best drummer currently doing the rounds, and new guitarist Ray DeTone, you have a mighty powerful unit indeed.

Amazingly, the songs just seem to keep getting better as the albums goes along; Halfway through you might imagine that the band won’t be able to outdo the pure US metal nirvana of Flight Of The Harpy; but outdo it they do, with a series of bravura performances from all concerned that simply have to be heard to be believed. Necessary Evil, perhaps the most ‘Ravenesque’ song in the set, is pure one thousand per cent proof heavy metal wonderment, let me tell you! And it’s not even the best track on the album!

I know I won’t hear a better heavy metal album this year – in fact I can’t imagine hearing a better heavy metal album until the next Helms Deep album finds it’s way into my clutches. This is special stuff, and you need to get it in your collection as soon as you possibly can. Amazing!

Chasing The Dragon releases on June 20th