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With a rather poor CD single, Far From the End of the World acting as a precursor to this release, it's hard to look at this release with great hope. While the title track off that single was good, the other album track on it, "Lonely Winds of War", left a lot to be desired. Well, here's Time To Be King, Masterplan's fourth full-length release, and both tracks are available here again, as well as a slew of other tracks that are often more powerful then both tracks. Could it be that the material that was meant to get fans pumped for the new album was simply a poor choice of judgement? While much of the material on this release is a far cry from where the band started and often lacks some of the emotion often associated with Masterplan, there's no denying this album is a solid effort that finds the band continuing to journey in the direction they have been traveling since their second full-length album. Time To Be King has a slew of great, powerful tracks on it, and the starting "Fiddle of Time" will grip you right away, but it's far from some of the band's best material. The same goes for the following track "Blow Your Winds", which goes at a much slower pace, almost like the band had this track in mind to be a power ballad, but opted to make it sound like a rather generic Power Metal track instead, causing it to be one of the bigger blows to the blows to the album. It isn't until the song "Far Fromt he End of the World" that we are greeted with that classic Masterplan sound that made the band what they are today through heavy keyboards that add a fantastical, and almost airy (if that makes sense to you) feeling to the music, which works well with the album's title track, "Time To Be King" thanks to some of the lyrics have references to flying. The rest of the album is about what you would expect. There are plenty of epic sounding tracks, such as "Lonely Winds of War", "Time To Be King" and "The Black One", but a good amount of songs on here seem to just flow as natural Power Metal songs backed by Masterplan's signature sound. "The Dark Road" and "The Sun Is In Your Hands" both come off more heavy on the keyboards then anything, and the latter starts off with a keyboard solo that goes into the band using only bass at the start of each verse, quickly kicking into the actual song. "Blue Europa", however, is quite possibly the best song on here, as it really brings the band right back to their first full-length album and original sound, which is so original and unique mostly through the structuring of the vocals against some pretty hard hitting Power Metal that is genuinely uplifting. One of the biggest peeves happened after comparing many tracks against "Lonely Winds of War". This track still sounds the same as the version that appears on the single, which actually is a great let down. What happened to the clarity that the rest of the songs have? Why does everything sound like a low bitrate MP3 of the song, but instead of sounding washed out sounds like everything was overmodulated to the point where almost everything sounds like static? The music is way too loud and the vocals almost sound drowned out against the music, especially at the end during and after the guitar solo where everything sounds like it's building up to become epic but just gets obnoxiously loud, which is sad because this is really a great and powerful song. When this one kicks in, you'll probably assume the volume on your stereo went up drastically to an obnoxious level, as it really does sound like it was just playing way too loud. This also happens during the other more powerful tracks on here, such as "Far From the End of the World", but that static is still there in "Lonely Winds of War". The next song that has as epic an instrumental coordination as that track would be tre track "The Black One", and even that one doesn't get as obnoxiously loud at any point as "Lonely Winds of War". This may not affect listeners with a tin ear, but those who can pick up on the slightest discrepencies will go absolutely batty. Hopefully, this is just due to some sort of mix up in the digital download that AFM records supplied for the review, but that seems highly unlikely. Time To Be King is a stellar album by Masterplan, but there's still a few tracks here and there that simply don't live up to the potential the band has. Aside those few tracks, however, are plenty of gems, including a few throwbacks to the early days of the band. Hopefully Masterplan continues to write these throwback tracks and we see a return to the good old days, but there's for time to tell. In the meantime, this release still has plenty of good tracks here that will have you coming back for more, leaving you with an album that has some good replay value to it. |
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