We have some Metal from Sweden today, kids. The band is called STARCHASER and they are releasing their second full album Into the Great Unknown via Frontier Records. After a small instrumental introduction, the album starts on the second track that names the album “Into The Great Unknown” that sounds like EUROPE but with heavier guitars. The sound and the production are very polished as you can hear in the tracks “Battalion Of Heroes” and “Who Am I” and the music seems to be composed primarily based on keyboard.

The band has competent musicians and was created by guitar player Kenneth Jonsson,who invited bassist Örjan Josefsso, drummer Johan Kulberg, keyboardist Kay Backlund, and vocalist Ulrich Carlsson. The singer reminds me of Myles Kennedy from ALTER BRIDGE and you will notice this on tracks like “Shooting Star”. Despite the keyboards doing the heavy lifting you will hear good guitar riffs, and lead breaks like in “One By One”. The songs are well composed and meticulously performed with nice melodies and a more thunderous overall sound in the background, however the songs are kind of too bland and nothing catches my ears so far. All seems to be too well produced and too clean despite the heavy sound.

Nevertheless, we have some highlights as in the song “The Nightmare King” that has a sense of terror and despair, and also the good “In Time Of Steel”. Both start the same way, with a sweet keyboard arrangement before the heavy guitars come in. This is that kind of band that is heavy and provocative enough to please your parents that does not like heavy rock or bad attitudes.Despite the “softer” heavy output provided in this album, the band shy away from ballads and this is surprising to me. I thought the last tune “Far From Home” was a ballad, but is just a short instrumental just like the first track “Stella Exodus”. A band that proposes a very melodic Metal, should be the best one to have a suffering ballad but they do not.

The album also has a nice cover of a very science fiction look that seems like it was taken from a page of Dune. The best track of the album in my opinion is “The Broken Empire”. This track is more paced, and guitar riff oriented packing an extra punch that is missing in some other tracks. A good second album overall but the sound is too spotless for my taste. We need some more crunch.