Gloryhammer - Legends from Beyond the Galactic Terrorvortex

I honestly found myself sufficiently put off by the advertising this album received that seemed to continuously find its way in front of me in either its most irritating form or while I was at my most irritable for some reason. It looked corny as fuck and artificially industry-planted, and being that I was only hearing about it from ads, from the label, I didn’t feel like giving it my time and attention, until I heard a few more murmurs about its intended ridiculousness and how well it worked with power metal from that angle in a slightly novel fashion. So when I gave in and found out that this project is masterminded by Alestorm’s Chris Bowes, it all made sense, and I’m glad at least that my looking into it revealed something I could enjoy at least for its context. As soon as its intentions became clear, I was prepared for a fun ride through exaggerations of many of power metal’s campy clichés and loveable cheesiness, and while this album and its absurd/tongue-in-cheek narrative do embody that anti-self-serious spirit of power metal, it doesn’t really follow through or commit as fully as its comedic hints suggest it should have. The album delivers a few Devin Townsend-flavored hits of loving parody of power metal’s gratuitous ridiculousness and a few signals that indicate that this album is meant to be taken even less seriously than your regular Rhapsody album. And I can possibly see how it might be hard to make a parody of a genre of music that already subsists with a pretty high degree of self-awareness of its own cheesiness in the first place. But I still have to say that espite my initial spurn for this album being shoved in my face, I was hoping for a little more of what it tried/promised. At the end of the day, Legends from Beyond the Galactic Terrorvortex is a mostly pretty regular symphonic power metal album; it definitely throws in a dash of obvious lighthearted joking, and there are definitely a few good fun, catchy tracks to enjoy, like “Masters of the Galaxy”, “Battle for Eternity”, and “The Land of Unicorns”. But for a project headed by someone with a pretty padded resumé in cheeky metal projects and for a type of music already brimming with unabashed over-the-top-ness, this album could have or should have stepped it up a notch to fulfill what it surely appears to have set out to do.
It’s not as fun when you already roasted yourself/10

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