The Italian Airborn was founded in 1995 by Alessio Perardi, who back then played most of the instruments himself. A few years later he hooked up with bassist Alberto Leschi and guitarist Roberto Capucchio and they released a 5-song demo called Born To Fly. However, they quickly realized that in order to be successful, they needed a real drummer instead of a drum machine and Tony Serra was recruited. The result of this union is Airborn’s debut album Against The World.

The music on this CD is a mixture of melodic speed metal and power metal, which is really nothing new and influences range from Iron Maiden to Helloween. The songs are quite straightforward and could do with a little bit more variation. Although it is not all that original I have to admit that Airborn at least has managed to avoid most of the clichés that are so prevalent in the power metal scene and once in awhile they actually do manage to sound surprising.

Against The World is certainly nothing groundbreaking but nevertheless highly advisable to fans of the power metal genre. The catchy “Wings”, the fast “Projectyle” and the playful “New Hope” show that Airborn surely are talented and especially their excellent use of keyboards outshines most of the other bands in the scene. Hopefully they will manage to find a better balance between originality, variation and melody on their future releases.

As a little extra Against The World contains a CD-ROM bonus track featuring “The Hero” video, which starts out with the nostalgic blue Commodore 64 basics screen before turning into a pretty cheap 3D rendered transformers type of video. It might be a nice bonus for the true fan but the video is in general looks too cheap to be interesting to anyone else.