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CANS ‘Beyond The Gates ’ (Noise Records 2004)
Cans is Hammerfall singer Joacim Cans first solo album and he’s put together
an all star band featuring members of Primal Fear, Fates Warning, Halford
and Hammerfall comrade Stefan Elmgren to help him out, not to mention
getting the likes of Jeff Waters (Annihilator) and Ronny Milianowicz
(ex-Sinergy) to contribute to the writing process.
Personally I’ve always found Joacim’s voice to be the weak link in
Hammerfall as his voice tends to grate on me, but his performance on this
album is superb and works very well with the darker (compared to Hammerfall)
tone of the music.
There’s an occasional Evergrey-ish sense of dynamics here and, perhaps not
surprisingly as Mike Chlasciak seems to be the major guitar player here,
there’s a major Halford influence in a lot of songs. The Halford/Evergrey
hybrid sound works particularly well on Soul Collector which has a chorus
that will lodge itself in your brain for weeks after. Signs is another
standout track, definitely the heaviest song on the album and I’m sure it
would get a great reaction at any self respecting ‘real’ metal club.
The only really weak track is ironically the one I was looking forward to
most when I saw that it was co-written by Annihilator mainman Jeff Waters.
Forever Ends is not the fast, thrashy song that you might expect, but
instead is a terrible power ballad that is so twee you suspect even Bon Jovi
would have thrown it away for being too lightweight! But then, you can’t
really complain about one terrible song when the other eleven are so good
and as it’s the last song on the album it’s easy enough to avoid without
ruining the flow of the album.
This is a must have album for all fans of the darker side of Power Metal,
whether you’re a fan of Hammerfall or not.
****
Review by Neil Woodfin
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