SERIOUS BLACK: As Daylight Breaks (MELODIC METAL): review / opinion to read on Music Waves

Here's another all-star band! It will soon be time to talk about fashion. So, as always, suspicion embraces us and, as we start listening to the product, we wonder about the honesty of the project's finality and therefore its intrinsic quality. Serious Black is its name - a reference to Potter's Sirius Black - Germany its cradle and bassist Mario Lochert (Emergency Gate and Visons Of Atlantis) its genitor.

You must have undoubtedly met the protagonists of this association during your musical strolls. The most famous of them are Roland Grapow coming from the Helloween and Masterplan, and Urban Breed, the vocalist, who turns into gold all the albums he touches. As for their compatriots, they've mishandled their instruments in Blind Guardian, Edenbridge and Dreamscape. It's true that we can be offered worse.

Serious Black offers us, with this "As Daylight Breaks", a very well-made melodic Metal album. This classical but efficient combination of influences, that we should look for in turn on the side of Stratovarius, Masterplan, Praying Mantis, Gamma Ray, Edguy and Avantasia, will delight the amateurs of power and chiselled melodies full of carrying emphasis. Also noteworthy are the progressive and atmospheric elements that lead back to Dreamscape and Tad Morose. Urban Breed once again does the job, his range between Dio and Jon Oliva is marvellous, the backing vocals are huge, the rhythm section is stocky and Grapow's impulses finish the job.

So here's a year 2015 that starts with a major hit for Melodic Metal. An all-star band that keeps its promises is not common, far from it. Serious Black proves that a combination of talents from many good bands can give birth to a team with the same qualities. - Official website

SERIOUS BLACK

AS DAYLIGHT BREAKS

AFM RECORDS

MELODIC METAL