RIDE THE SKY 'New Protection' (Nuclear Blast) RATING: 6.5/10

By RYAN MAVITY

New Protection by Ride the Sky isn’t a bad album, just not a terribly original one. If you are familiar with bands such as Queensryche, Iced Earth and Dream Theater, well, New Protection is going to provide you something kind of like that.

Not that it's really a bad thing; there are certainly worse bands to emulate. The album has some things going for it, such as the crazed keyboard playing on "The Prince of Darkness" or the frenzied guitar solos on the title track and "A Smile From Heaven’s Eye." Many of the songs are anthemic and grand but with some brains behind them, very much the kind of rock Queensryche has specialized in over the last two decades. Everything about New Protection is big and over-the-top. As power metal goes that’s usually a positive thing. The band is gifted musically. Much like Dream Theater; they are able to play just about anything, often at high speed with incredible technical precision. In between the fist-shaking anthems come hard rockers like "Break the Chain," whose guitar riff and keyboard lines sound like something out of Faith No More’s playbook from The Real Thing days.

But the album eventually runs out of tricks and no matter how hard the band tries to get us out of our seats, it doesn’t quite get the job done. Tracks like "The End of Days" and "Far Beyond the Stars" try their damndest, but you feel like you’ve heard this already, and in fact, you probably heard it earlier on the same album. "Endless" tries to sound like a power metal version of "Born to Run," with a similar keyboard break.

Like I said, there is nothing inherently wrong with the album. It’s just that there is nothing new here. If you are a fan of power metal as a genre, you likely will dig this record. But for the rest of us, it takes itself too seriously to be goofy fun. There are plenty of other bands that have done this same style of music better.