Ariadna Project
Fire of Hate

I will start the review like this, immediately: this is a hell of a crappy album! 

This would be one of those albums you should never buy, not even under torture, as it would annoy even those who had steel balls constructed to avoid a ball-busting of the sort: I need a pair of balls like this, big, hefty, and indestructible, a bit like Robocop or those of Terminator.

A simplistic, easy-peasy power metal album that owes much to the Finnish teachings of Stratovarius (R.I.P.), where keyboards with their Mozartian loops do nothing but annoy the listener, being omnipresent in all (yes, all!) tracks of the batch.

Something unheard of, damn. The production and the technical skill of the musicians are indisputable, nothing to say about that. The bass and drums perfectly keep time, the singer tries to imitate the sacred monsters of the genre (Sammett, Kiske, and Kotipelto himself), while the guitars, with their neoclassical and baroque virtuosity, carve out truly enchanting melodies. Melodies accompanied by those damn keyboards, the only real low point of the album. This album would have been fine if only Stratovarius had never been invented.

It’s pointless, therefore, to proceed with a track-by-track and a microscopic analysis of the songs since they tend to all sound similar without much subtlety! Right from the opener "Fire Of Hate", you can understand the genre offered and the path the band intends to take. And not even a ballad like "Until The End" is enough to catch our breath (actually the only song far superior to its peers) from an earthquake of keyboard and symphonic duels.

The only song really worth mentioning is the more than successful cover of "More Than Meets The Eye" by Europe, which breaks that power-Stratovarius thread to offer us a healthy and fresh '80s hard rock revisited in a heavy metal key.

In conclusion, an album that, currently, serves no damn purpose unless used as a tool for a good and healthy skeet shooting practice or, for those less skilled, it’s excellent as a pizza cutter wheel.

Stay away.