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There has to be some kind of cloning facility somewhere that just makes guys who sound exactly like Bruce Dickinson, because this is like the third band I have heard lately who sport a singer who could record with Maiden and you would never know it wasn't Bruce. Vocalist Raphael Mendes sounds so much like Dickinson, it seems almost like some kind of joke. Like, no, really, that has to be Bruce—the sound is just too close otherwise.

It can be hard to judge music like this with the vocals making it sound so much like Maiden on the surface—your brain wants to equate it to Maiden even if the similarity is not that pronounced. Icon of Sin play straight up Heavy Metal that is not trying too hard to sound like Iron Maiden, but not exactly trying not to, if you know what I mean. In general, this is better written than I expected, and the production and musicianship are first-rate. An interesting thing is that this sounds like Maiden, but it doesn't sound like any specific era of Maiden—it's not the rough early stuff, the epic middle, or the slower, more proggy late-period style, so it's just that if you play direct Heavy Metal with a singer who sounds like this, the comparisons are going to be impossible to avoid. Still, a solid album in its own right.