Power Quest reviewed
Power Quest
Master Of Illusion
(Napalm)
When keyboardist Steve Williams and Steve Scott left Dragonheart in 2000, they surely did so thinking their new project, Power Quest, had just as much chance “making it” (this is power metal we’re talking about) as their old band did. Wrong.
And it’s hard to imagine they’ll ever be right, given Dragonheart became Dragonforce, who, millions of people around the world now know because of a game called “Guitar Hero III,” which featured “Through The Fire And Flames” as one of its toughest songs.
Hindsight is 20/20, of course, and it’s not as if Williams and Scott are sitting around doing nothing. Power Quest’s new album doesn’t provide power metal with anything new, but Master Of Illusion is nonetheless solid. The group sprint out of the blocks with “Cemetery Gates” (not a Pantera cover, though come to think of it, why hasn’t somebody given that song the full PM treatment it deserves?), led by Williams’ fleet-of-fingers synth runs. If they had put second song, “Human Machine,” where frontman Alessio Garavello ridiculously echoes his own vocals in an annoying whisper, toward album’s end (or just left it off) they could have avoided Illusion‘s early momentum loss. Luckily, “Civilised?,” a song about the world’s lack of basic human decency, cracks the whip again. Power metal isn’t generally used as a soapbox, but Power Quest overtly wax political and social a few times besides “Civilised?.” They fix their crosshairs on our (PQ are English) President (the lying, deceiving, greedy, destructive, environment-raping — the usual) during the title track and denounce violence in the name of religion on “Hearts And Voices.”
All in all a decent effort. We aren’t saying Power Quest should be on “Guitar Hero IV” or that Williams and Scott have stuck it to their old bandmates here, just that if you have to settle for second place, Master Of Illusion ain’t a bad horse to be ridin’.
— Trevor Fisher
Click here to download Power Quest’s “Human Machine.”
