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FAIRYTALE
Army Of Ghosts

Pure Steel (2023)
Rating: 7.5/10

Emerging with only their third full-length record since forming in 2000, Germany’s Fairytale constructs a vast, steely bridge between traditional and power metal genres.

It’s difficult to monitor the progression of this five-piece combo, simply due to the sporadic nature of releases. Their last album, 2017’s Battlestar Rising, was an interesting symphonic sci-fi journey and to an extent it was a world away from their 2011 debut Rise Of The Twilight Lord, but one thing you can be certain of with Fairytale is their ability to treat you to galloping rhythms mixed with the soaring melodious vocals of Carsten Hille, who joined the ranks in 2014.

This is sturdy, crisp metal with great doses of gloss, streaked with sublime solos and some truly heavyweight grooves, such as on my favourite track ‘Voices From Inside’. Elements of subtlety creep in too where the enigmatic ‘1428’ trudges smoothly like a mechanical monster lumbering through the battlefield. Elsewhere, ‘Morningside’ rumbles in epic mid-tempo fashion, ‘Elizabeth Dane’ ups the haste ever so slightly, and ‘Possessed’ cavorts in darker trajectories with its fiery vocal sneer.

Army Of Ghosts is a very solid heavy metal opus that beats with pure heart and molten magic.

Neil Arnold

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