The Barque Of Dante - Final Victory (2009) - Passion for European art, culture and power metal - 70% (11/07/12)

On this debut record, we get to hear fast European power metal featuring rapid melodic guitar solos, loads of keyboards influences, high pitched male vocals and a couple of female guest vocals. The band sounds like a mixture of Elvenking for their rare folk influenced passages, DragonForce because of the fast melodic guitar solos and the cover song that closes this record, Rhapsody Of Fire concerning the calmer and somewhat cheesy piano ballads and Dream Theater when some passages are dominated by fast and melodic keyboard sounds.

Any expert who doesn't know much about the band would be sure that this line-up would come from Germany, Italy or maybe France in reason of the band's name and the album cover. The lyrics that are mostly influenced by fantasy themes and medieval European history seem to underline these ideas. But the solution is none of the above as this band comes from the colourful Sichuan province in the south-west center of the People's Republic of China. The band sings about "heading to the west" and simply seems to have a passion for exotic European cultures just like many Europeans feel the same kind of interest for Asian cultures.

Once the origins are revealed, one discovers a couple of hints, especially in the folk influenced parts of the record. "Farewell" contains some oriental sounds thanks to a vivid violin play and some female vocals that sadly sound to thin to fit to the enchanting music. The male singer is also far from being perfect and has some problems with the higher notes or when the songs try to focus on his skills. A good example is the calm "Warrior's Ballad" that is the second song to include some slight Chinese folk elements but that suffers from a boring vocal performance.

The two singers really aren't the strength of this band. In one song called "Immortal King", we though get to hear a third singer that does some surprisingly unique narrative growls. This epic and well elaborated track has a lot of potential and this album would have needed more songs of this kind to truly convince but let's not forget that this is the band's first strike and it was recorded in difficult circumstances. The band wanted to release the record one year before it actually came out but the Great Sichuan Earthquake destroyed all the band's recordings and they had to start all the work again. Maybe that's also one of the reasons why this record is now called "Final Victory".

In the end, this band sounds too much like their European idols to truly stand out. There are still a couple of enjoyable tracks on this record with the highlight being "Immortal King". The band has some potential with three different vocalists and they should use this diversity more in the future. The band could also use some more Chinese folk elements without getting completely rid of their passion for European culture and history as there are already quite a lot of Chinese metal bands out there that only sing about their own culture. Lyrically, this band might seem ordinary to western metal fans but in their own country, they may happen to be rather unqiue. The musicians should also try to create longer albums than this one. Without the short instrumental introduction and the DragonForce cover, we only get half an hour of music. Next time circumstances may be better and the band could add fifteen or twenty minutes of music to their second output.

In the end, this record is a lovely little gem for fans of European power metal around bands such as DragonForce, Elvenking, Magic Kingdom, Rhapsody Of Fire or Saidian. Anybody else should not try them out but they have some potential and one shall wait for the things to come and see what kind of second output they may create, maybe with the help of their new vocalist Thomas Winkler who turns out to be a real European as he is a young singer from Switzerland.