All-you-can-eat buffets. They’re gateways to gorging on gastronomic wonders, a foodie’s foray through the forest of culinary delights. Buffets are a shortcut to satisfaction, but sometimes there’s only so much Salt and Chilli Chicken you can stomach before it’s time to call it a night and head home. As power metal veterans FREEDOM CALL celebrate their 25th anniversary, Silver Romance serves up a reminder of why all-you-can-eat buffets are both a blessing and a curse.
Warming up like a sensible plate of starters — your sesame prawn toasts, spring rolls, and chicken satay skewers — the title track is a booster shot of euphoria, as power chords straight from the 90s power metal playbook synthesise their past, present, and future into a single song. Continuing through the buffet’s plethora of plates, Symphony Of Avalon and Supernova are taste sensations that bring the sizzle to proceedings; the former pulling its ingredients from QUEEN’s We Are The Champions as much as it does pure cheese power metal and Cotton Candy-sweet hooks, whilst the latter’s sparkly Eurovision synths take you on a wild ride through a cosmic supernova, with a chorus so catchy you’ll claim they’ve created ‘power-metal-pop’.
Three tracks through and head chef (and vocalist) Chris Bay might as well have made the tasting menu of your power metal dreams. Silver Romance, for the first 25 minutes or so, achieves the right balance of flavours between pure cheese and serious shredding. Infinity’s striking keys and racing riffs dart across the stratosphere, Out Of Space is heavy metal for Mario Kart fans, and returning drummer Ramy Ali’s pounding percussion puts your heartbeat through its paces.
Several courses in though, and that second plate of roast pork in honey sauce isn’t looking so sweet. Blue Giant brings the bloat, as its sweeping, mountainous riffs, and its lightning in the bottle buzz roll over into formulaic fields, before a niggling bout of nausea begins with Big Bang Universe, its bombastic, suspense-building balladry overcompensating for a lack of substance. Sorry folks, it feels like FREEDOM CALL have started to run out of steam, like sprinting the first mile of a marathon.
If Silver Romance’s 53 minutes start to become a struggle, just listen to the lyrics to sign Bay up as your personal cheerleader. Behind all the power metal pomp and high-level production, there’s a serious sous chef spinning plates, carrying the team through with messages of self-love and positivity — the kind we all need to hear with the world the way it is right now. It’s impossible not to want to make our world a better place when In Quest Of Love pipes up and says “Hold on tight, let’s share this night together / In quest of love and peace will bring back belief / A new world in harmony, for everyone”.
By the time the cheesiest cheese board you’ve ever consumed — aka Metal Generation — closes out this all-you-can-eat power metal buffet, you’re ready to be rolled out the doors. Silver Romance, for the most part, is a celebration of the magic of FREEDOM CALL; just come ready to be left bloated by its never-ending platter of power-metal-pop.
Rating: 7/10
Silver Romance is set for release on May 10th via Steamhammer/SPV.
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