Review by Tony Gaskin

Long awaited album from local underground metal stalwarts finally gets unleashed!!

It’s taken a while to put pen to paper for this review, but I wanted to make sure I was comfortable with writing a piece for an album from a local band that just happen to be very good friends as well.

Difficult though it was, I’ve put all thoughts of friendship to one side and tried to look at this album from an honest and pragmatic viewpoint, although I’m sure there will be certain detractors out there who will still accuse me of arse licking and nepotism!

After two long and fraught years of recording, Dakesis finally found saviours in the brilliant engineering skills of Peggy Bellamy (drums) and Jack Traveller(everything else) to get the level of perfection they were after, and believe me this band are perfectionists almost to the point of OCD.

The rest of the album continues in the same vein, but there’s enough difference in song structure, tempo and cadence to make the whole thing listenable again and again. From the Soaring “After The Storm” to the power ballad “Broken” via the heavy “Into The Light” there is something for everyone, even a bit of cheesiness with “Wings of Steel” and a good old sing-a-long with "Valhalla"

The sharing of vocal duties between Wayne and Gemma also serves to break up any thoughts of monotony that can sometimes infect the Power Metal genre

This band are one of the best live bands around, and they’ve captured that energy and power for this album, and, despite the limited resources available to them, this is easily the most accomplished underground/unsigned album of 2011, so much so that it’s attracting a lot of attention from the European scene, look out for huge things for this band in 2012

9/10