GAMMA RAY — Power Plant (review)

GAMMA RAY — Power Plant album cover Album · 1999 · Power Metal Buy this album from MMA partners
2/5 ·
Warthur
Call your power metal album Power Plant, and that's a pretty clear signal to anyone that this album is going to be Gamma Ray business as usual - all power metal, all the time, done in the well-worn Gamma Ray style. The cheese is strong in this one, at points overpowering the band's sense of taste; whilst the idea of a metal cover of the Pet Shop Boys' It's a Sin isn't terrible, the execution here is predictable and doesn't really shed any new light on the song. (If you know the original song and Gamma Ray's style, you can probably guess, without hearing it, what a Gamma Ray cover of It's a Sin sounds like... and, yeah, that's pretty much what it sounds like here.)

On the one hand, you wouldn't want to write off an album like this based solely on one track... on the other hand, if that track is the only one which is especially memorable, that's clearly a huge problem, and I found that that's the case here, with the "Wait a minute... that's a Pet Shop Boys song!" moment being the time the album really manages to make me sit up and take notice. Gamma Ray and power metal fanatics will still enjoy it, but it's a poor starting place for any exploration of their discography.

(Also, though this doesn't affect the grade, I have to call out the cover art here. It's one of those really prize atrocities from that era when people seemed to think that cheap 3D rendering was an acceptable look for an album cover.)
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