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I surprised myself by actually liking Fairyland's debut Of Wars In Osyrhia, as I normally don't go for that kind of overblown bombastic Rhapsody fellatio. But that album had great vocals from former Dark Moor diva Elisa, plus some really strong songwriting, sadly this follow-up album has neither of those things.

The cover art and interior design is very cool on this album, very Frazetta, and I was hoping that maybe Fairyland had heavied up and gone a bit more traditional and epic, rather than more keyboardy. Again, sadly, no. The booklet is by far the best thing about this album. What we have here is almost an hour of faceless Euro-Power Metal with absolutely nothing to distinguish it. The new singer, Max Leclercq, is fine vocally, but the vocal melodies on this disc are uninspired and in places really bad. The 'metal' is just a very thin patina of uninteresting rhythm guitar mixed waaaay in the back, and the keys are the central point. I think bands as diverse as Bal-Sagoth and Freedom Call have proved that you can make the keys central as long as they are good, but the songwriting on this album is lackluster, repetitive, and intensely uninteresting.

I would rate this worse, but there is nothing really bad about it, it just isn't really any good either. As background music, this would be fine, but there is just nothing exciting about it at all. On their sophomore effort Fairyland manage only a pale shadow of the potential they flashed on their debut.