By: Anders

Posted: Jul 7, 2006

The Prowlers hail from Italy, and as you might have figured out, from their name, they started out as an Iron Maiden tribute. Though with time they got blood on their teeth, and started to make their own music in the image of Iron Maiden, Dream Theater and more traditional melodic European power metal. "Devil's Bridge" is the band's second full length effort and their debut on Locomotive Records, so now they're ready to conquer Europe.

The band takes off with pretty traditional means within this genre. They have a good melodic metal base, with many sweeping melodies and good atmospheres. On top of that they add technical elements, as great technical guitar leads, progressive keyboard parts and kinda weird sounding breaks, at least weird sounding in this context once in a while. There are good details from the guitars, some good melodic lead duels, some good harmonies and the basic riffs are often quite good as well, even though they more or less “only” delivers classic hard rock. The sporadic keyboards are often well used and good, though once in a while it becomes a bit too spacey for the overall feel in the music, and at other times the play reminds me a bit too much of Dream Theater. When speaking of Dream Theater, the drumming must be mentioned as well, there can't be much doubt about that drummer Claudio Cappabianca is very inspired by Mike Portney, even though he doesn't reach the godly play Portney delivers, the drumming on this album is stuck in the minor wanna-be league. It wants to show a lot, but often fails.

The compositions are as such pretty good, when the band keeps it simple it rocks and the flow is good. Though when the band becomes very progressive and technical, it is like they can't keep up with their ideas, and it falls a bit together, and many of the very progressive parts do take a lot of inspiration from Dream Theater. When firing up under the traditional metal with a steady rhythm, blazing guitars, no keys, and the vocalist singing with his softest, yet powerful vocal, the band sounds the best.

The Prowlers do have a lot of talent and utilize some of it well and shows some good ideas. Though often the ideas isn't delivered as well as they should be for the music to work really well and make the songs flow. I have often taken myself in thinking: "c'mon stop these breaking rhythms and play some more plain metal, it sounds better", and it would be a lie to say that is something positive. The band has to get rid of their very evident compositional inspirations and work on their own paths some more, or get some more Iron Maiden-esque parts into the overall picture, the few times they sound like Iron Maiden, it actually sounds good and natural for them. This is a decent album that shows a band that can get a promising future.

Rating: 5/10

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