Crystal Ball - Dawnbreaker (2013)

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Crystal Ball - Dawnbreaker (2013)

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Many stories have been written of a group of friends forming a band, weathering all the storms of success and failure, all to come out as one cohesive whole at the other side. Many more yet have been written of bands with lineup changes being the order of the day with only one or two core, occasionally co-founding member(s) to justify the continuation of the same name. Switzerland's Crystal Ball has had the unique distinction of having both stories apply to their career, which by 2007's album Secrets had seen just over 10 years of five founding members bringing several albums of solid, retro-80s inspired power metal with a rocking edge to the starved masses, come to an end with the exodus of two of its original five. Nevertheless, the core of the band still held true and the aforementioned 2007 album largely stuck to the same formula and featured the same distinctive vocal hybrid of Joe Elliott and Joe Lynn Turner leading the charge. This all came to an end a couple years later when charismatic front man Mark Sweeney exited the fold to pursue his solo career and also join forces with German guitarist Michael Voss to form the heavy metal project Wolfpakk.

The resulting 6 years of studio silence following this band's last studio foray with Sweeney at the helm might have suggested that the end was near for Crystal Ball, but that all changed with the arrival of a late blooming and largely unknown vocalist in Steve Mageney and the release of the Anyone Can Be A Hero single. Though it provided only a two-song sampling of what was to come later in 2013, it provided about as clear of an indication that this band was looking to go a tad bit harder on the aggression side of the coin while still maintaining their 80s AOR affinity. To put it plainly, Dawnbreaker finds Crystal Ball taking the plunge into doing what they were sort of hinting at during the Nuclear Blast period, namely adopting the modernized, heavy-ended brand of rock-infused power metal that Masterplan had popularized about a decade prior. Along side the fact that Mageney's voice is pretty close to that of Jorn Lande in all its Coverdale-like swagger, accented with a slightly raspier character in line with Rick Altzi and maybe even Nightmare's then front man Jo Amore, the production and songwriting approach, while still heavily streamlined and rock radio oriented, has received a correspondingly massive boost.

To usher in this moment of pomp and circumstance, adorned with a lofty external visual of the sun peering past what appears to be a burning planet Saturn, no expense is spared in the grandeur department. The aptly titled "Zarathustra" is a dense, guitar-harmony rich reinterpretation of "Sunrise" off Richard Strauss' Also Sprach Zarathustra (better known as the 2001: A Space Odyssey tune to modern lay people) that ushers in the grand entry of the new Crystal Ball, and what follows is a rather interesting blend of Crystal Ball's past and the more recent past of power metal. Heavy-ended crushers such as "Break Of Dawn", "Back For Good" and the slightly off-kilter bluesy acoustic romp turned speeder "Power Pack", though very simple in presentation, very effectively emulate the sound of Masterplan's Aeronautics. Ironically enough, the somewhat more coasting fist-pumper "The Brothers Were Right" make the previously noted comparison all the more fitting given the accompanying subject of the discovery of flight. The bulk of these songs largely tend to run together a bit due to a fairly strict songwriting template, but the trudging groove machine that is "Skin To Skin" breaks away from the mold something fierce by being inescapably catchy, ditto for the Eden's Curse inspired throwback to the previous album and infectious anthem "Sun Came Out".

Perhaps the only real strike that could be levied against this album other than the extremely bare bones formula and lack of overt technical noodling (Scott Leach does get a little fancy with the pinch harmonics during some of the riffs, but his solos, while beautiful and loaded with harmonized candy, sound tame even compared to old times like Brian May and Ritchie Blackmore) is that it's not the most original thing to come out of 2013. It's a slight cut above the bulk of Masterplan's 2013 comeback after Jorn's second departure Novum Initium, but overall it doesn't really do much with the formula that said band has been playing with since 2003 except strip it down a bit further. Then again, the songwriting is on point and it isn't much of a challenge to get into most of these songs. It's basically a clever act of evolving while simultaneously not really changing, relying largely on the same basic formula that was present circa 2002 and simply amping up the production value and the amount of force behind everything to give the appearance of development. It's a bit more difficult to find the overt 80s rock influences on here relative to the early days, but they are still in there, and it is doubtful that it'll ever be absent.

hells_unicorn, metal-archives.com