Time Signature
Midnight metal...
Genre: power metal
I've said it before: cheesiness is an obligatory ingredience in power metal, but it can very easily become too much. My favorite type of power metal is that which keeps the cheesiness at the required minimun, focusing on rocking hard instead.
On "The Dark Flower", Italian Cydonia manage to navigate the seas of cheese safely. There are some very cheesy moments, but they're balanced out by heavy groovy guitar riffs, much like Symphony X, as well as thrash metal sections (a couple of tracks on this album can actually be described as thrash metal songs) as well as some more progressively inclined moments. This is power metal akin to Annihilator, fellow Italian power metallers Arachnes, Harrow, Nevermore and Rawhead Rexx: it's power, and it's metal, and the equilibrium between cheesiness and hardrocking metal is perfect.
This album will probably appeal to fans of more hardhitting power metal, and I suspect that fans of traditional metal and thrash metal might like it, too.