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Female-fronted power metal? Of course, I'm in. The oddly named Lankester Merrin (a character in the novel The Exorcist) is a German band that's been in existence since 2019 and Dark Mother Rises is their second full-length album. They play a gritty style of power metal with some electronic flourishes, so bands like Battle Beast and Burning Witches came to mind as I spun the album. The performances are spotless and the production spacious, table stakes for power metal and there are entertaining tracks like "Medusa" and "Stranger." Nothing you haven't heard before, but solid enough with decent hooks and catchy choruses. On the flip side, I find a lot of the lyrics off-putting. Yeah, yeah, I don't normally pay as much attention to the lyrics but some of the stuff on here is very heavy-handed. There is no subtlety to "Sweet Lizzie," where the well-known "Lizzie Borden took an ax..." poem serves as the chorus, or "Bone Tomahawk," and even though they aren't overly gruesome they are so blunt and in your face, it is like getting hit over the head with a frying pan. Then there's "Perfect Illusion" a song with a tone so at odds with the rest of the album it is jarring, made worse by the fact the band plopped it right in the middle of the track listing. It sounds so much like the pop-inspired, MTV-friendly Lita Ford song "Kiss Me Deadly" from 1988, I had to check to make sure it wasn't a cover of a lesser-known song from that same album. Dark Mother Rises is a Jekyll-and-Hyde album with some decent tracks but some that are not great, so if you're going to check it out, set your expectations accordingly.