Ah, a breath of fresh air. I like Black Metal as much as the next man, but when one listens to new Black Metal promos for weeks on end, it's nice to get a little genre variety in my diet. TRAGEDIAN is a Power Metal band from Hamburg, Germany and it has all the common traits of German Power Metal. It's fairly straight forward, lots of hooks, and lots of meaty guitar riffs, though these guys also make liberal use of the keyboard. Right up front there's not much to complain about here, this is a solid, well-paced Power Metal album; it's far from unique and it doesn't really stand out amongst other Power Metal releases from the last few years. It's early in 2021, so I imagine I'll forget about this album until I start sitting down to make my year end list, but it might grab a spot.

Getting into the music, "Rising Rage" does a great job of setting the pace for the rest of the album. Not every song is as fast as this one, but "Rising Rage" is a fun riff fest with a solid hook. It's like in a TV show, the cold open has to hook the audience and get them intrigued by what's going to happen next, "Rising Rage" is a great cold opener. Unfortunately, the more time I spend with this album, the less impressed I am by it. I mean it's fun, but songs like "Aloneless" aren't super memorable.

Then "Out of the Dark" has this really awkward Hard Rock groove that just really throws me off. Unfortunately, I think the production/mix make this song sound worse than it should, because it really has some fun moments. All the guest vocalists unfortunately sound very out of sync in the mix and it's ultimately a song with good ideas and poor execution.

"Darkest of Days" gets us back on track with blistering speed and maybe not the chunkiest riffs, but the keyboard makes up for it. The chorus is okay, but this band clearly would rather be a Speed Metal band than a Symphonic Power Metal band and this album is a really weird crossbreed of the two. "Bringer of Dreams" has a cool enough groove and some speed as well as an actual chorus this time.

"Crying in the Rain" is a dreadful ballad, I'm sorry and please take this with a grain of salt because I have a huge bias when it comes to power ballads, they generally suck, and this guy doesn't have the voice to make it any better. In fact, because of how the vocals are mixed it kind of sounds even worse! "Enlightened" is pretty fun, and probably my favorite performance of the vocalist Joan Pabón on the album. There's plenty of solid tracks in the middle of the album, "Forevermore" is fun, "Destiny" is decent, but then the last couple tracks on the album are slow/mid-tempo and it just killed the ending of the album for me.

It's not that I didn't like this album, but when I first listened to it I was really enjoying it, but the more I paid attention and the more I listened to the mix the more my opinion went downhill. There's plenty to enjoy on this album, but TRAGEDIAN is on their fourth album and the production should just be better than this. It's not quite amateur, but it's close.

If these guys want to take the next step they need to look into fixing their mixing/mastering deficiencies and I think I would enjoy their material a lot more, even though I'm not usually into speed Metal. This album has some really good ideas and is just hampered by poor execution, but I would recommend this album for people who like Speed Metal and Symphonic Power Metal.