And Dragonforce are back! Whether you love to hate them, hate to love them, or just plain cannot contain your excitement whenever their name crops up, they have returned with a new offering – with the wonder just how long they can carry on with the core values that they have established in their music.
‘Maximum Overload‘ follows off from the band’s slight change in direction began with 2012’s ‘The Power Within‘ – more refined songwriting to pack all the Dragonforce essentials into shorter more memorable offerings, and this album succeeds even more in that than the previous effort did. Clearly the days where Dragonforce loaded their songs with 6-7 minutes of speed soloing are gone, as identified with ‘Ultra Beatdown‘ it was becoming seriously stale with the pure length eclipsing the fact that there were moments of brilliance in the album. Fast forward now to ‘Maximum Overload‘
Kicking off with ‘The Game‘, the darker side of Dragonforce emerges blasting into heavier riffs and lyrics proclaiming abject failure in something. Whatever the song is about, the album is quite far from a failure. Standard Dragonforce procedures are in abundance – the speed, the catchy vocal lines, the 8-bit synth and the technical proficency are all there. The difference is the shorter length of the song allows iconic guitarists Herman Li and Sam Totman to really experiment with more refined leads in the bridge of each of the songs. While the album starts dark, it continues into the standard Dragonforce of what we’ve come to know and love. Synth enhanced classic power metal sped up to tempos faster that a gerbil chasing a carrot.
It’s really a whole lot of the same, but ‘Maximum Overload‘ does manage to diversify itself enough to keep some sort of interest in each track, for example tempos actually change and there is always a key element that is a little different, such as the Stratovarius influenced ‘Symphonies of the Night‘. Other highlights include ‘City of Gold‘, another fist to the sky singalong track and the brilliant cover of Johnny Cash’s ‘Ring of Fire‘.
In this case the same is good, as Dragonforce have avoided becoming irrelevant and churned out what is actually a pretty good album. Not great, but more than enough to explain why Dragonforce continues to sit atop the power metal perch.
