Review Summary: Dominated by an amazing opener, the rest of The Prophecy fails to match it.
The Prophecy could easily mislead you into thinking it was an amazing album if you only heard its first proper track. The oddly named
Friends for Life hits like a truck straight out the gate and in general exudes so much power and energy that it's almost impossible to stop listening before its done. Concise, incredibly aggressive, wonderfully heavy production (the drums in particular have a lot of weight and snap to them), with a great chorus, it's honestly probably one of the best power metal tracks ever.
And then comes the rest of the album.
Squealer started as a more thrash oriented band, with their first demo coming out in 1985. Both the prior full lengths to The Prophecy were pretty aggressive melodic thrash albums with a few standout moments but ultimately not much to distinguish them from the hoards of similar bands besides their comfort in mid-tempo material and ballads like Hellcome in Heaven. By the time of The Prophecy, these features had manifested in a much clearer power metal direction. Armed with a pretty effective vocal dynamic, with lead vocalist Henner's Hetfield-esque snarl and a variety of background vocalists usually popping up during choruses, the band had a good foundation for their new direction.
Unfortunately, despite some excellent moments throughout the album, The Prophecy fails for one key reason: pacing. Friends For Life is pretty much the most overwhelmingly good opener to choose and gives an impression that the album will be filled with similar aggressive tracks, but it takes a really long time for the album to really provide any others, with track 8
I See The World being the first track to really match it for aggression. The title track that closes the album also manages to be pretty aggressive, but after Friends for Life there is a stretch of 5 overall pretty average mid tempo power metal songs that suck away all the momentum the album should have had.
But No One Cares is the first of them, and is a decent track with good use of keyboard parts to provide a bit of extra weight and tidy melodicism, and another good chorus. The clumsier
Live Everyday follows, and appears promising in moments like its bridge with some harsh vocals that provide some much needed edge, but the chorus isn't as strong and the verses get too repetitive and dull.
Hold on Tight is one of the real momentum killers and one of the worst tracks here, with a dull riff and one of the least interesting choruses.
By this point the album's momentum is pretty much gone.
To Die For (Your Sins) is a pretty decent ballad-type track and
Nowhere to Hide is a satisfying mid-tempo stomper, but in the context of the album they only serve to deaden the pace even more and lose all their deserved impact. Thankfully I See The World finally kicks in here and is like an oasis in a desert of bad-to-decent mid-tempo power metal. Pretty much dropping all power metal characteristics, it manages to pretty much just be a very fast and heavy thrash metal track that desperately tries to right the ship.
The Meaning of Life is probably the best of the mid-tempo tracks, with some melodeath-esque tremolo picking and some good riffs all round. A perhaps ill-advised
Enjoy the Silence cover rounds out the mid-tempo tracks, and probably would work if not for the baffling attempts to imitate Dave Gahan; the closing vocals in Henner's usual style are good and even sound a bit
Devin Townsend-esque, but one can't help but wish they were used through the whole track.
It's sad that Squealer squander the potential of this album with a few duds and some really bad pacing, because if it were 3 tracks shorter and the more aggressive tracks were spread more wisely, it'd probably be a very strong album. Instead, The Prophecy feels neutered and restrained by weaker musical moments that often encapsulate good ideas and musicianship, but not engaging songwriting. Whilst their next album would fix most of these issues, it is unfortunate that some astonishingly good tracks like Friends for Life don't get supported here.
