Well, that multi-cultural and hyperkinetic extreme power metal band is back to have a go at kicking the tar out of our ears again. It seems like I just recovered from their last album, Inhuman Rampage, only to get a new aural assault when I least expect it.

This time around, I’ll have to compare Ultra Beatdown to their previous albums, since they’ve obviously grown by increments, if not leaps and bounds. If you haven’t heard anything by this band, I’d suggest one of their few anthemic ballads to start, as their speed in any other songs can be quite overwhelming when not expected. If you want, you can read my other reviews of their albums, Sonic Firestorm and Inhuman Rampage, to get an idea of what they sound like. This band plays fast, and even that is an understatement sometimes. One may wonder if they’re not going to be content until they break the land-speed record with their instruments! However, it’s not just speed for speed’s sake; they infuse that speed with their own style, and almost every song has a anthemic, over-the-top and epic feel to them. Because of that, many of their songs can sound the same… but only if you’re listening with half an ear! When you really listen, you can hear a complexity in their compositions that most listeners would ignore.

As I’ve stated, with this new album, the band does some more musical exploration and experimentation. Some of the songs have more of a progressive element, and they use changing tempos even more than ever. However, while I have no problem with softer interludes to make things more interesting, their use of interludes in a few of the songs was quite jarring and left me scratching my head. Otherwise, they’re definitely flexing some serious musical muscle, even compared to the last album…

Heroes Of Our Time – Starting off with a bang, as per usual. A good, catchy beat makes up a song for their first single and video. I like the change-up at :29! Very good opening showcasing what we can expect on the album.

The Fire Still Burns – I love the epic way this starts; I caught myself playing the intro over and over again. The bridge before the chorus just grabbed me and wouldn’t let go. The chorus is especially catchy. The interlude at 4:27 is good, but it almost threatens to derail the feel of the song because of how long it goes on. Thankfully, the band picks up the pace before it becomes unrecoverable. After the solo, there’s that cool “who-oh-ah-oh!” chant that the band is most famous for in quite a few of their songs. Only they can pull it off that well… and get away with doing it multiple times!

Reasons To Live – Here’s where the band shines! The beginning started off weird, but the band gets it back together early on. Right when the “Hold me, save me!” pre-chorus kicks is, they had me chanting along. The kickdown to half speed at 2:50 was rather jarring, but I can understand why they did it. There’s a brilliant part from 3:36 to 5:06 that they wanted to transition to, but did they have to suddenly drop the tempo to get to that point? The little touches that make many of their songs so special are evident, with an example being the wolf-whistling guitar at 5:06!

Heartbreak Armageddon – This is a track that I found myself playing the most so far. The chorus is just too catchy not to sing along! Dragonforce packs so much power in this song that I seriously believe they could light up a city the size of Chicago with this song. However, the interlude at 3:50 does the same thing as the one in The Fire Still Burns; it derails the overall feeling of the song and it takes a severe jolt from the band to get back up to speed. The rest of the song is just as brilliant as the beginning, and the ending made me forget about any previous musical transgressions!

The Last Journey Home – And now for something somewhat different! Dragonforce proves they can do… not just fast… not just slow… but an actual mid-tempo song! This is actually an enjoyable effort from them. Listening to it, for some reason, made me think of all the cool anime movies and shows I’ve ever seen. It just has that kind of feel to it. Of all the songs so far, this one has them flexing the most new musical muscles. (I’m not making a deal of the interlude in this song because it fits very well.)

A Flame For Freedom – And now we have the “typical” anthemic power ballad that Dragonforce has done something similar to on every album. Yes, nice break from the rest of the album. Yes, it’s beautiful sounding and makes you wanna hug your neighbor and hold a lighter in the air for all the fallen heroes. Nothing wrong with that. However… move along now, nothing interesting to see here.

Inside The Winter Storm – Back up to their usual speed now, this song just sounds so urgent and so much fire is poured into it and then, at 2:36… POW! What the heck happened?! This is the musical equivalent of, as Douglas Adams put it, “going from fourth gear to first, thus making your engine leap out of the hood in a rather ugly mess.” They pull out of it at around 3:16 and proceed to make the rest of the 8:12 song enjoyable. This is the one song, though, that a interlude like that just didn’t need to be there.

The Warrior Inside – An excellent song overall, with all the power, complexity, speed and conviction that only Dragonforce can throw together in their own patented formula. The piano at 3:46 is a nice touch and really doesn’t take away from the song, especially whey they can hold my interest with everything else going on. It wasn’t as abrupt as the interludes in the other songs I perhaps complained about. The chorus is especially catchy! They slow it down abruptly at 5:55, but this offers a nice closing to the song.

Bonus song – Strike Of The Ninja – Here, they do a bit of experimentation with their overall sound and song tempo/feel. The result is very enjoyable in this, compared to the rest of their songs, very short song!

Bonus song – Scars Of Yesterday – Here’s some more experimentation for us. They do some different things in this track, most notably an interlude that has a kind of new age-ish southwestern feel to it, along with a healthy dose of video game influence to keep the gamers in the audience happy.

All in all, I think this is still a great album to own. Not as awesome as Inhuman Rampage, but it still rates as an enjoyable listen for most metalheads with a thirst for power, speed, melody and style. I have this album and their two last albums in a playlist on my iPod, and it mixes so well with their other songs. I sometimes need a good Dragonforce marathon!

Cheers!

First, sorry I haven’t posted lately. Not much has been happening as of late since the last post. That being said, I finally got the call from Best Buy that said I could go and pick out a camera to replace the one that their repair facility failed to fix. Yesterday, I had my decision made on a Sony Cybershot; I wanted to get away from Fuji for a while, since my last two cameras were from them. However, I saw their newest (and I mean “new” as in “fresh-off-of-the-first-run-assembly-line-new”) offering sitting in their camera bar and it was much different than their other point-and-click cameras that I’ve owned.

This is a Fuji S2000HD camera. I literally went slack-jawed when I saw this thing. I had to confirm with the sales guys that it was new because I didn’t see it there when I window-shopped a month ago (believe me, I would have remembered it!). It’s so new that there are still no reviews on it anywhere, not even on Amazon.com. The first thing that caught my eye was the zoom numbers… 15x optical!!! That is almost unheard of in a under-$400 camera! Looking it over some more, the thing just screamed “feature laden!”. You can read all of the camera specs by clicking here. Like I said before, I’ve always been happy with Fuji’s picture quality, not to mention video as well (when my last camera worked right!), so this was really a no-brainer. It’s now the same price as my previous camera was about 4 years ago, so the replacement was still free. However, I had to get a new two-year warranty and a new camera bag; good luck trying to fit this li’l guy in my old camera pouch!

Yesterday, I spent my whole afternoon reading up on all the features. Some of them went right over my point-and-click-trained head. However, I’m not quite a stranger to manual settings, as I’ve gotten some of my best shots from experimenting manually. For now, I’ll show off some shots I did last night and this morning that I did after setting the overall settings and putting it on “Auto”.

(These images are hosted on Flickr.com. Click here to see the whole photoset with subtitles!)

Also, I wanted to do a quick video test with sound. That’s also the reason why my last camera went to repair. This camera actually shoots in QuickTime HD format, so I wanted to see the quality for myself. It can shoot video at resolutions up to 1280×720 (HD framed) at 30 fps. The video below was shot at the camera’s lowest resolution setting, 320×240, at 30 fps in MP4 (H264) format, then compressed in iMovie for the same resolution at 15 fps in MOV (H263) format.

I think it turned out rather well! By the way, excuse the messy bedroom.

All things considered, I think I’ll be glad to take this camera with me on the upcoming Germany trip. I didn’t want to rely on my phone’s camera to do all of the shutterbug work. And I’m happy that I’ll be able to shoot some video because, in some situations, it can say more than pictures can ever say!

My next blog entry will have a special treat for anyone here who follows the (mis)adventures of Thommen, our parrot companion. I’ll post it sometime this week, so keep visiting.

Cheers!