I’ll have to admit, I wasn’t looking forward to having to listen to this album. After reading the promo which went something like this: "The music flows through picturesque landscapes, sometimes roaring powerfully through bizarre canyons, sometimes clashing with massive boulders, sometimes flowing through epic valleys of green." The nightmare visions of a leather-clad, big haired throwback band from 1982 started haunting me again. But I’ll have to hand it to them, it ain’t half bad.

The entire album is a melting pot of metal genres. Don’t be surprised to hear elements of thrash, death, power, melodic and hard rock, all in this record.

Arrangements are excellent, with the listener swept from crushing riffs to soothing acoustics without spoiling the tempo of the music.

An example of this is to be found with the outro of "I Stand Alone In Fires" leading into “Back In Times Of Splendour". It goes from riffs to a keyboard melody to a mysterious violin sound and then back into a thrash riff; excellent stuff. They also shake up the general album format with two colossal tracks of 14 and 17 minutes long. The amazing thing is you never get bored listening.

There’s something for a fan of every genre in this album, go fish it out and find out!