Dream Evil

Less than a year after releasing their debut, Fredrik Nordström, Snowy Shaw and company are offering their follow-up album, Evilized. Somewhere along the way, Dream Evil started taking themselves too seriously. From being a light-hearted addition to the power metal genre and tribute to metal’s past, the band has fallen into tired cliché. Lacking DragonSlayer’s quirky charm, Evilized evokes teased hair, tight jeans, and high-top runners. Sadly out of place, "Invisible” offers a fun break from the suffocating melodrama (really, how many times can you stand to hear someone sing "I’ve never felt this way before”?), and "Children of the Night” is a decent hat-tip to ’80s hard rock and metal. The rest of the album becomes tedious with alarming speed, sounding rehashed, worn-out, and overused.