June 11, 2010

Reviewer: Chris

For the last few years female-fronted bands have had to live in the unfair shadow of Nightwish and their onetime vocalist Tarja Turunen whose soaring operatic vocals set the bar all-too high for females in metal music. Aside from the legendary Doro Pesch, no female vocalist is as revered and put on the metal pedestal like Tarja, much to the disadvantage of some of the other talented females raging along the scene. Granted, the Tarja clones of late are enough to make you throw down your gauntlets and gothic attire and just call it a day. Still, there are some very capable bands out there vying for their small corner of the metal spectrum.

Romania’s Magica has been around the block for a few years now, with its fifth album Dark Diary showing a more mature Ana Mladinovici, the group’s vocalist. For the first couple of albums, especially The Scroll of Stone I found her vocal to be more than decent, yet missing….something. I’m not sure what it was that failed to completely impress me then, but the casual sexiness to her delivery this time around is refreshing and enchanting. In the past her Romanian accent, while quite enrapturing, was so thick that it made for some real moments of befuddlement for me. For Dark Diary Ana hits all of the perfect spots for a style that is both pure and a step above the myriad of Tarja clones that are so prevalent today they make this writer want to pull out an Emo kid’s kidney with an olive fork! “Wait for Me” is so severely Ana’s vehicle to showcase that voice that it should almost be radio-friendly (Odin help me, I said radio-friendly!) but not to point of commercial sell-out mode. The band retains its metal background nicely, no question or worry there. The band would find a hard time finding any vocalist better to fill Ana’s leather pants, that’s for sure! While not overpowering she is powerful, yet perfectly feminine. She seems to have found her perfect voice.

The music is not your typical power metal in that there are no annoyingly overpowering keyboards picking up slack for either incompetent or undervalued guitar work. The keys provide the hauntingly precise background intended for the music, exactly what keys in metal music are meant to do! Take heed, power metal bands! Well-crafted songs with some very interesting breaks within (as in “Release My Demons”) make Magica’s latest release a winner for these very prejudiced ears. While it’s musically in line with Hereafter, the band’s 2007 offering, Dark Diary offers a very vibrant album for fans of power, gothic and traditional heavy metal music. The songs themselves are not necessarily ground-breaking, but they are certainly heavy metal goodness to a proverbial tee.

Other standouts include “On the Side of Evil,” “Used to Be an Angel” and the title track. I truly enjoy this album in its entirety and I’m thinking fans of the genre will also get the magic herein, every pun intended.   

Release Date: May 28, 2010
Label: AFM Records

TRACK LISTING

1.  Anywhere but Home
2.  Tonight
3.  Never like You
4.  Wait for Me
5.  Need
6.  Release My Demons
7.  On the Side of Evil
8.  My Kin My Enemy
9.  Used to be an Angel
10.  We are Horde
11.  Dear Diary

Total playing time:  42:32

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Magica - Dark Diary