Review by Jophelerx on September 4, 2024.

Finland's Battlelore are an interesting group I discovered pretty early on in my metal journey, as in that time around early 2009 they were riding the success of their two biggest albums up to that point, 2007's Evernight and 2008's The Last Alliance. While they'd always been on Napalm Records, they certainly broke through in a more substantial way into the American market around this time, as I remember seeing their albums at Best Buy alongside your Kamelots and Hammerfalls around this time, and after checking out the music videos for "House of Heroes" and "Third Immortal," a friend of mine bought this album and let me rip it to my computer as well. While the harsh vocals make this, at least in theory, a bit less accessible than your typical 2000s power metal fare, which was what my friend and I were primarily into around this time, the symphonic shtick and fixation on Tolkien made this an easy sell for most Europower fans, ourselves included, and perhaps the success of the Lord of the Rings films helped Battlelore to gain traction, though looking at the timeline that should have hit hardest around 2005's Third Age of the Sun, which was the band's first album to release following The Return of the King, and that album really didn't do nearly as well as its 2007 successor. Either way, Battlelore were wildly successful for what amounted to a Finnish gimmick band that brought the "beauty and the beast" style vocals to an audience that was eating up things like After Forever and Epica at the time and were really just in the right place at the right time both thematically and stylistically. I'd say 2008's The Last Alliance was their best album both commercially and in terms of musical quality, but there's definitely a fair amount of nostalgia coloring things for me, so you should certainly evaluate their discography on your own and figure out yourself.

That said, The Last Alliance is a definite step up in terms of budget and production, with everything sounding much bigger and more cinematic than it had on previous albums, particularly the first couple which sounded quite cheap and bedroom-ish. Evernight was quite well-produced too, but to my ears, this one is clearer and a bit more polished, with everything coming through crisply without falling prey to the common modern metal problem of gimping the guitar tone or cranking everything up to 11 until it's difficult to pick out individual elements. In fact, the guitar tone here is definitely thicker and meatier than it would be for a typical power metal album. As I've said, Battlelore isn't *strictly* power metal, but fall more into what I'd call "Tolkien-core" or maybe a better term would be "fantasy-core," part of a wave of quasi-extreme symphonic metal bands that are steeped in fantasy elements, alongside bands like Summoning, Bal-Sagoth, and Turisas, which tend to appeal to a primary power metal audience without being out and out "power metal." Battlelore is probably the tamest of these bands, ensuring they'd have appeal to most of those who can stomach any sort of harsh vocals, as they feature Kaisa Jouhki's soft, ethereal clean vocals to counteract Tomi Mykkänen's yells and growls. In fact, in some songs, like "Guardians" or "Daughter of the Sun," Jouhki's soothing croon stands on its own for much of the song before bringing in Mykkänen for some angry war metal goodness, and while I think that ultimately the two work best in conjunction with each other, I don't think this is a mistake in the context that it's used, as it's always done in softer sections where adding Mykkänen would be overkill.

Jouhki's ability is somewhat limited, though, as she has little range and no power to speak of, certainly no Floor Jansen or Simone Simons in terms of technical ability, but the band clearly knows how to best utilize her, so it's never really an issue. Alongside copious amounts of synths and keyboards, pummeling guitar riffs, and Tomi Mykkänen either barking or occasionally also doing clean vocals, she sounds great, exemplifying the lyrical ambiance of the elves or the Valar in Tolkienian mythology. I should point out that you really need to like synths to like this band because they're often taking lead over the guitars, which often feel more like a part of the rhythm section than anything, providing a nice meaty foundation for the rest of the music to rest on but very rarely taking the spotlight. There's also no insanely charismatic and talented vocalist here for fans of someone like Roy Khan or Hansi Kursch to focus on - in fact, on paper, this really shouldn't work nearly as well as it does, but the band has chops where it's important - namely, the songwriting. Crafting intricate soundscapes whose often over-the-top nature belies the subtlety of the craft responsible for them, this really serves more as a soundtrack for a certain lyrical idea - namely, Tolkien and high fantasy - than a collection of songs, per se.

The only flaw with the band's formula here in my estimation is that some songs can go on a bit long if they stick to one element - either the harsher guitar and male vocal element or the softer symphonic and female vocal counterpart. "Daughter of the Sun" is an example of this, and while it's quite a beautiful piece, I feel it could have been trimmed down as the pacing is quite slow and we get nearly half the song before the placid soft opening is countered with some heavier stuff. However, the song does have a pretty cool section at the end going for it, with Jouhki adding some semi-harsh "whispers" to add to a discordant, evil ambiance, which is a nice touch. I think the album overall is a bit longer than it needs to be as well, though, with 11 songs being a bit more than I need for this style where most songs have little to make them stand out on their own and start to run together after a while. By song 10 or 11 I'm starting to feel like the band is just rehashing the same ideas and milking them a bit more than they're good for, though there are touches here or there that are memorable. Still, most of the band's previous albums coming in around 9 songs and in the 40-45 minute range made more sense and felt like a good fit for the band - imagine a Dragonforce album coming in at 11 songs (before adding in a cover or alternate version), and you'll get what I'm talking about. (Yes, Reaching into Infinity, I'm looking at you.)

Overall, The Last Alliance isn't without its flaws, but we're not talking about a band full of guitar wizardry or vocal acrobatics here - we're talking about Battlelore, and for what the band aims to do I think they accomplish it very well here. For someone looking for a cinematic version of symphonic, beauty-and-the-beast laden fantasy-core, this hits the spot better than most of its competition, and nowadays I still prefer it to most of the limp-wristed, female-fronted symphonic metal scene, as it still retains a bit more of a metal backbone than something like Epica or Nightwish, and has a broader range of focus than just a singular operatic vocalist. It may not do any one thing better than the majority of its competition, but it brings everything together in a way that's bound to appeal to fantasy nerds like me and has quite a bit of charm to it that still feels fresh a decade and a half after its release. If you're curious about this band or interested in symphonic metal that has a bit more of an edge to it than the standard female-fronted fare, The Last Alliance is a fantastic jumping-off point.

Rating: 8.4 out of 10