I couldn't help noticing that Dragonforce are about to release a new album. Or more accurately, they're releasing the same album that they've been releasing since 2001 again under a slightly stupider title - this time they've chosen to give it the name Ultra Beatdown, continuing the line of album titles that will (as predicted by kjorteo - we'll see if it's true) eventually lead them to Total Pwnage at some point around 2012.

Originality might be their biggest obstacle, I feel

This band has been annoying me for some time, mostly because I can't work out why I dislike them. If you'll bear with me for a moment, they're like Arnold Rimmer's sandwich from Red Dwarf - all the ingredients are right. They're (mostly) British, and everyone knows I've really been needing to cling from anything from there for the last two years. Frédéric Leclercq was in Heavenly, who released two of my favourite albums ever. The band leader, Herman Li, is clearly ludicrously amazing on the guitar. He's also very into his retro games, naming his techniques after things like Pac-Man, and overall seems well aware that the band as a whole sound like an old Nintendo game. And all those right ingredients smash together to form something that doesn't work - or at least, doesn't work because I tell myself it doesn't, even though I find myself quite enjoying them every time they come up on a random playlist. (It's probably a fanbase thing, in much the same way as I described in the entry below.)

Their album(s) seem to take an iterative approach to songwriting, collecting stock phrases together in slightly different ways each time with the addition of some new ones that are then later incorporated into the mix. The latest released video to come out of this technique is called Heroes of Our Time, and actually surprised me quite a lot. It's true that the bulk of it consists of as much jumping about with guitars and playing them backwards as you could reasonably expect, but I had to admit to myself that the ending of the song is phenomenal. Go straight past the rest of it to about 4:30 and ignore the way that they're all standing with their legs so far apart that their trousers must need to be specially reinforced to cope - that sound is rather more what I would expect from people like Angra or Gamma Ray. If this is a sign of them maturing, diversifying a bit (producing songs that are separately identifiable, for example) then it's all for the better.

But to sum my previously held impressions of them up, I cannot even try to do better than a reviewer that I read at random while picking through Metal Archives to check the release dates. He praised their ability but admitted that "the wankery piles up to a point where your head sort of explodes". Another reviewer was more enthusiastic about them, championing them for not "wasting time" on any intros or other more general forms of musical coherency and for just being "forty-five minutes of endorphins injected straight into the eyeballs". So there you have it - if you're the kind of person who enjoys injecting endorphins straight into your eyeballs, this is the band for you.