White Wizzard - Flying Tigers review

Year : 2011
Genre : Power Metal
Label : Earache Records
Origin : United States
Rating : 6.0 / 10

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White Wizzard brings your skirted Puma shoe power metal fix via ambivalent methodologies and related successes. There are no secrets-, nor any intent to conceal the lack of those - WTF?! - that the members of the band are Iron Maiden fanatics, and the music on their latest output indeed is 59 minutes of diligent worship performed for the sole rapture of the Iron Maiden song structure and its musical narrative. The singer has a convincing siren-throat, too.

What strikes you as something of promising qualities right away, is the "feel" of the product itself. The record-, as a commercial commodity, comes to you in slick, beautiful presentation, and you are quick to find yourself in the utterly/terribly unfortunate position of WANTING this LP to be so much more consistent in quality than it actually - sigh - is, most of the time. Unfortunately there is not too much reasons to add a "most of the time" into this sentence, either. Read on to find out more about this Iron Maiden fanband release.


Musically, White Wizzard serves you finely produced-, decent power metal in its TOP form, but, it shows a reoccurring misplaced satisfaction in harassing your awareness with perplexedly shallow instrumental content, as well. First and foremost, the record is about 25 minutes longer than it probably could have brought a respectable prime for with, and it is something to say about a 60 minutes declaration. During this terribly long abuse session of much less efficient segments than the release can claim as peak moments, you will hear musical "ideas" that are originating from a stale, cheap and rudimentary approach towards riff-, and songcraft.

Here is my grim suspicion : a huge chunk of this record is not made out of a desire to attempt to realize the music actually HEARD inside by its creators. These segments, instead, came into existence as the unnatural expression of an industrialist's self-proclaimed moral obligation to deliver his heaVVVy!! fucking. metLLL!! time to time. "OK, guys, here we are in the studio, here are the beer barrels, guys, now let's make some Iron Maiden metal music, we know how it is done after all, right guys? Right?" Oh really. What makes Iron Maiden's music efficient, in my opinion, is the emotion and the "mere" sonic rendition of the emotion, which ultimately it is all about. Emotion is something you can't substitute with anything else. If you have no idea or thought behind the emotion, or, God forbid, have no emotion at all, then, guess what : it will show.

As result of this, White Wizzard's Flying Tiger LP is oftentimes found repeating coarse-ass, sweaty, tired power metal riffs Iron Maiden would not embarrass itself to shit out. The band is doing this abuse "fueled" by a desperate attempt to summon a sear promise of legitimacy to their more enervated riffs and pseudo-ideas, and the album has a robust share of those, in my opinion. Success in the pursuit of legit power metal is less frequent - though doubtless present - of an entity to greet than relative failure is throughout the Flying Tigers record. Titling an album like this after Iron Maiden's Aces High is like forming a band Tigera, too.

The music is never "bad" on this release. When flatting out, it is just uninspired, and shows no cunning to realize it. 25-30 minutes of this 60 minutes just do not make the Geiger counter grouchy, you know? It does not make the fucking thing beep at ALL, in fact. That is the key factor, in my opinion. The album, though sports a rather legit early portion, steadily prevents itself from emerging as instant recommendation as results of its lack of capacity to spot-, rebel against-, and omit its portions of uninspired power metal platitude harassment. This is easily one of the best mediocre releases of 2011, yet it without doubt exhibits a modest set of memorable moments worth to revisit.

Rating : 6.0 / 10

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