A Euro Power Metal band from Italy; the picture is not that dim. In an over-raped Metal sub-genre it is quite rare to, nowadays, find something in this kind of songwriting/performance to be impressed, huh? SEVEN GATES unleash their second full-length CD and the number of times this album shall spin in a CD player can (partially, OK) act as a measurement of value, in a (abnormal...) way.
SEVEN GATES have put great loads of effort and trust into their band. That's true. You can tell by the album cover, the production, the promotion they do. Conscious enough they do not possibly want/need a record label in order to expose their music, they do offer the complete The Good And The Evil CD free for download at heir official site. That does prepare a warm feeling of reception from the potential listener, right?
SEVEN GATES will surely remind you of many things going on in the Italian/European Metal scene. Less complex/cinema-like than RHAPSODY OF FIRE and as melodic as LABYRINTH/ATHENA, they pursue the typical double-bass drumming pattern with the keyboards crossfiring the guitars and vice versa, while the vocals are high-pitched and impressive. Thus, put a STRATOVARIUS/MAIDEN/GAMMA RAY legacy too in the mix and stir it up with their own character. The songwriting is a result of tough labor, that's obvious; there are various themes in each song, there are certain melodies/hooks allover, some parts do bear this ‘epic' attribute, mild ideas do detensify in between speed-on typhoons. On top, the vocals of Federico Puleri are quite moving; clean and convincing in screams, they do dress up the music really well.
The drums sound - to begin with the drawbacks - is slim enough, preventing the songs from getting the volume desired. Nothing else in defect would someone detect while listening to The Good And The Evil for (more than) a couple of times, I think. This leading us to the result itself: notable yet non-fascinating music, excluding the case you're a melodic European Metal aficionado (in this case, you shall give extra credit to they keys sound, too - a vision of differentiation do we witness here, kinda away from the typical velvet-ness widely heard).
The Good And The Evil does/should fire at the ears of melodic Power Metal lovers only, to conclude. SEVEN GATES do what they do quite beautifully. If not yet fed up by the 'train-kept-a-rolling' deadlock of this kind of Metal music, you can download the whole album here and see for yourselves.