Ultra Beatdown starts as all their albums do: with a blast of wailing guitars, fists-aloft keyboards and jittery, warp-speed guitar riffs that make you laugh and look around you, assuming it’s an elaborate joke. None of those descriptors are fake or designed to impress you – they are what Dragonforce really sound like, and furthermore what Li and Totman admit that they sound like.įour albums in, Dragonforce know what they do best and have stuck to it. Dragonforce are metal on nitrous oxide metal after a big hit of skunk metal on poppers metal on ecstasy metal crossed with happy hardcore techno. However, when you add the insane tempo of most of the songs to their relentlessly upbeat, uplifting tone, the result is something completely new – not so much extreme metal but extremely cheerful metal. No big deal, you might think if you’ve spent more years than are strictly good for you listening to extreme metal. The trademark Dragonforce sound, built in the studio by guitarists and primary songwriters Herman Li and Sam Totman, is based on immense speed. Here at last was a power metal band with something new to offer – a unique selling point which I’d never heard anywhere else in metal or its handful of subgenres. Imagine my surprise, then, when Dragonforce "exploded onto the scene"™ a few years ago. There’s no aggression in power metal: it’s like thrash metal without the testes. None of these things would be inexcusable on their own, but power metal usually suffers from a balls-free production that is too sickly for words. Beloved of Germans and Americans, the world’s most irony-free people, power metal revolves around fast (but not particularly extreme) guitar riffs, vocals that are at best weak copies of the Bruce Dickinson air-raid siren and lyrics about eagles flying over the mountaintop to Valhalla. Power metal as a genre is hard to take seriously.
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