Review Summary: By harnessing their limitless energy and setting the pyrotechnics to a timer, Dragonforce have returned with their finest effort in years.
At the risk of rewriting history, there’s an air of seriousness that has been conspicuously absent from Dragonforce’s music for some time now. Don’t get me wrong, the band has essentially always been about two things -storming against some ill-defined empire with the power of friendship and face-melting guitar wizardry that flies in the face of any measure of good taste- but there was an element of earnestness to the group’s earlier efforts that made the lethal amount of sugar easier to stomach. The obvious marker of this change was the shockingly mainstream popularity of “Through the Fire and the Flames'' thanks to its appearance in Guitar Hero 3, which lead to their next album,
Ultra Beatdown sporting some horrendous album art sporting a Gears of War chainsaw gun as some sort of olive branch to Gamers (™). In a way, the group’s pivot in branding to acquiesce to the baser tendencies of newfound onlookers allowed them the fortune of no longer having to worry about writing songs that made any sort of sonic sense and instead focus on crafting songs that could function as taller mountains for plastic, five-buttoned guitars to climb on the leaderboards.
Of course, the Guitar Hero franchise managed to bite the bullet around the same time as the group had experienced a fairly major shakeup in its lineup. The group rallied with a jolt of energy in
The Power Within before facing a bit of an identity crisis. Other than some extremely light “technology bad” commentary on the thrash-leaning
Maximum Overload, the band has essentially kept the lights on by essentially being the “okay, now let’s do a silly one” version of ACDC. It’s a bit overly dismissive to say if you’ve heard one Dragonforce song, you’ve heard them all -but it’s not exactly wrong, either. Dragonforce took the hardest pivot yet with 2019’s
Extreme Power Metal, slowing down the tempos and leaning into every possible 80’s pastiche possible. In case the cover art, with its sports cars and laser guns, and tracklist that included a cover of “My Heart Will Go On” weren’t enough to tip you off, the band was fully leaning into the cheese factor. The attempt was admirable, but the results were mixed, with the increased focus on songwriting and slowed tempos gave more opportunity for the cracks of their formula to show.
Warp Speed Warriors, thankfully, makes good on just about every promise the band has ever had and is the best Dragonforce album in at least a decade.
To be clear, the Old Dragonforce is, in fact, dead, but here the band at least murder that notion with a flashy, over-the-top fatality. The days -perhaps some Golden Yesterday that they can cram in their nonsense lyrics- of the band approaching their material with any bit of pretense are far gone. We’ve got Morrigan on the cover and a song called “Power of the Triforce,” so that’s on you for thinking otherwise. But the band is all the better for cutting out the little seriousness that there was. “Doomsday Party” is conceptually one of the funniest songs I have heard in recent memory by answering a question that nobody asked: What if Abba could shred? While power metal puritans, if ever such a thing could be possible, may scoff at the lack of commitment to whatever tropey bits Blind Guardian outlined, you simply can’t deny that it’s good fun.
While the cheese factor is firmly set to “kill” here, that doesn’t mean that Dragonforce doesn't treat the material seriously. In fact, there are plenty of flourishes here that the band have simply lacked the songwriting maturity to pull off before. “Space Marine Corps” is maybe the best song the band has ever written, and has these subtle -a word I never thought I would associate with this band- keyboards and synths that give a ton of personality to its friendship-propulsion verses that past versions of Dragonforce would have never conceived of. Of course, that song takes a hard turn for the absurd as the instruments temporarily lay down their arms so that a drill sergeant can lead a call-and-response chant about space blasters; I wasn’t kidding about there being no half-measures. “The Killer Queen” is another killer (ugh) track that takes advantage of the theatrics on display, with its gang shouts of its title at a breakneck pace that somehow allows every musician in the band to have their time in the limelight, as if they are each unleashing their signature anime attack move that simply must be announced. Even the token ballad “Kingdom of Steel” manages to be a lighter-waving triumph rather than an excuse to take a bathroom break.
Let’s be clear,
Warp Speed Warriors isn’t going to change anyone’s mind about Dragonforce. While the band have impressively managed to navigate their signature wankery with the sort of surgical precision that can only come with age, they are still yapping about magical camaraderie …
in space. You can actually judge a book by its cover, and whatever preconceived notions you have are still mostly in tact.They aren’t suddenly something that they are not. But this is simply the highest level that the band has operated on since their inception. The electrifying closer, “Pixel Prison,” has more than a few sections where you can practically hear where a younger version of this band would’ve have wallowed far too long in fretboard heroics, but here they manage to have the jams go on
juuuust long enough to have things feel ridiculous, but not exhausting. For any detractors, there’s ample evidence here of the band being everything that they are accused -hell, the deluxe edition has a cover of Taylor Swift’s “Wildest Dreams” that is just as easy to laugh at as it is to laud- but there has arguably never been a better time to enlist in whatever Space Army of Friendship that Dragonforce have constructed.
