BROKEN DAGGER – Chain Of Command

After a few minutes of lending your ears to this production, you might come up with the following thought… Somebody must have treated this production like an “unwanted child”! Take some care of it, but not too much. Love it, but do not let your affection get too serious. And so it seems not to be very surprising at all, that the opener on Broken Dagger’s first studio album Chain Of Command bears this name.

“An Unwanted Child” starts clearly uptempo, very nice “Power Metallish” riffing mixed with synth-organ, nice breaks, nice, more nice and even very nice! Organist Urban Mansby and lead guitarist Magnus Wohlfart are opening up for a musical crossfire – without friendly fire. The team play is gorgeous, the harmonics are smooth – an opener that was put just at the right position of this album. By this stage you’ll easily forgive the first weaknesses concerning the album production. The lead guitar tones seem hardly loud enough, singer and choral are clearly dominating the scene – but still – a very good one.

Then “The Black Loutus” offers a little distraction. It is a strictly Classical piece… very dark, no guitars, only classical instruments. Despite its dark aura you might say “nice” again.

While the descent of the Roman Empire spanned over centuries, Broken Dagger manage to ruin their musical reign in a few minutes. The attitude changes completely. Song number three is, in comparison to the “Unwanted Child”, a test for your brain not to send out the chain of command to “touch the fast forward thing as fast as you can with both of your digits”.

Snare beating and rough sound mixing, as well as a strong notion that something is just not right are discovered in this one quickly. As the song goes on this rude impression is softened by the fact that guitar and organ are blastingly played. But… the lead vocals simply hurt and the chorus is so dominant, that it makes your speakers crackle.

Track number four offers – surprise – nothing new, except for an as yet inexperienced grade of pain that your ears now discover. The background singers get on you in a second and Niklas Olausson tries very, very hard to scream his guts out. Maybe he should just try singing with his own voice. “Wow”, song number one promised a completely different album.

Track number five “He Will Die” gets better as lead guitarist and organist show again what they’re made of, very nice soul from both of the guys and even the singing gets less painful as in the one before.

Besides all the Progressive Speed Metal there must be a certain amount of space for the slower tunes. “Fire Within” is a ballad… or better was meant to be. At one part Olausson sings “she makes me run” and this is pretty close to it. Not to be mistaken, at times the singing on this album is very decent, but then all of a sudden it sounds so unbearably artificial. The band was well aware of that, obviously trying to cover that timely lack of quality with a big chorus, which makes the fact even worse!

And so the story continues for another five tracks, all include the mentioned “good” and “bad”. To draw a conclusion… Broken Dagger have not lived up to their potential yet. But they’re still in their early 20s and so there’s a lot of time for improvement left. Hail and Good Luck!