Holy Force United States

"On this their debut album, Holy Force combine traditional metal and power metal - leaning mostly towards power metal though, and mostly Euro power metal. This means epic and catchy choruses, lots of melody, neoclassical elements and mostly uptempo tracks, but also a bit of cheesiness (mostly in the form of Sonata Arctica-like keyboards).

Holy Force is guitarist Ango Chen's brainchild, the music is understandably guitar-driven, but never to such an extent that it belittles the other musicians (we are, after all, dealing with Mike LePond, Rhino, and Mark Boals), who - of course - perform very solidly on this album. There are a lot of guitar solos, delivered with a classic 80s epic stadium lead guitar sound, and Chen shows that he masters both neoclassical shredding and melodic rock feel in his solos (it also sounds like he throws some Asian elements in there, probably probably traceable back to his Taiwanese roots).

The musicianship is top top notch, and if you like epic melodic European power metal with the sensibility of melodic metal, then you should check out Holy Force's debut album.

(review originally posted at metalmusicarchives.com)"