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Ah, Dream Evil, proof that you don't have to have any artistic integrity or change a damn thing about your sound at all to get a record contract and release music and be a generally famous metal band worldwide. But goddamn if they aren't entertaining as fuck anyway. This is In the Night, almost a decade after formation and their fifth album into their career, and how does it fare up? Eh, it's about what you'd expect.

The most astonishing thing about this is just how much fun it is at times even in the context of being shallow and artistically bereft candy metal. I mean...this is just silly all around. It's a Power Metal album released in 2010 still holding onto clichés like album title In the Night and song titles like "See the Light" and "Immortal." That either takes a huge amount of balls to not feel like you're doing something redundant or a complete disregard for every outside influence that could ever possibly inflict itself upon you. They obviously didn't spend more than ten minutes tops writing these lyrics and picking song titles, which would be horribly asinine if the album weren't still so much fun. Good god, they even used the rhyme "They come to take my life/They come to take my wife"! This...this is just stupid, but I'll be damned if I'm going to say I don't like it anyway.

I am serious. Even despite the fact that I've been listening to this band for half a decade now, songs like the epic "Immortal," the heavy, booming title track, the melodic firestorm of "See the Light," the crunchy "Frostbite" and the blazing "Kill, Burn, Be Evil" are still hugely entertaining to me. The whole first half of this is damn good, with big riffs and renewed energy and charismatic vocals galore. Without Gus G., the band seems to be having a lot more fun, and the energy just goes through the roof on every single track. We do hit a serious dead zone in the form of the terrible "The Ballad" – about as funny as a stubbed toe. What's the point of taking the piss out of conventional stereotypes like this when they could have just as easily AVOIDED that and released an album with no ballad at all? "Mean Machine" sucks too, with a really lame chorus, but luckily that's about as far as this album dips in quality.

I probably shouldn't be going so easy on this album, as I doubt the band was even really trying past the point of just writing the hooks, and there are tons of bands that are putting forth ten times more effort and getting ten times less recognition in the underground. But goddammit, this album is still too catchy and too much fun to ignore. Dream Evil is only about one step above a joke band, but at least they are an enjoyable farce, at that. Recommended if you can't get enough of this chorus-and-riff bare bones heavy metal. Cheeky fuckers.