Cristiano Filippini's Flames of Heaven - The Force Within Review

I have always wondered what makes a band be called after the name of its mastermind. The first, and most important I guess, that comes to my mind is Ritchie Blackmore’s Rainbow. Of course, there are many others, but my memory doesn’t serve me right now. In fact, I can’t help it thinking that it’s some king of egotrip doing this. So sorry for that, but in my mind it’s to show to everybody who’s in charge of the band. I don’t mean any harm to Cristiano Filippini’s Flames of Heaven though. Well, then it’s just my opinion of what beats me.

Mastermind Cristiano Filippini is really a very talented musician who got the attention of Matias Kupiainen of Stratovarius who helped mixing the album. Because of the proximity to the legendary Finnvox Studios, the collaboration with Mika Jussila (Nightwish, Stratovarius, etc…) who became the mastering engineer on this album. Very interesting facts that bring some light to the guy.

Power Metal is one of the most reliable subgenres in Metal music. I mean, the fan can get any Power Metal effort and won’t be disappointed with the music within for it’s very predictable. I don’t mean predictable in the bad sense, I mean it as a good feature. However, there are indeed some slight diferences between bands. Cristiano Filippini’s Flames of Heaven play a Symphonic Epic Power Metal with all the grandiloquence, pompous and grand features of it. In some ways, “The Force Within” is all of this and I’ll add another adjetive that is in the press release: kitschy. As a matter of fact, some may find that cheesy gives the tone of the album much better, but I don’t agree with that by any means. I guess pompous explains “The Force Within” much better than kitschy and cheesy.

“The Force Within” opens up with “Ab Angelis Defensa” an intro that reminds a lot 1974’s Rick Wakeman’s “Journey to the Center of the Earth” a real epic of art rock in its most classical music tone. The tone of the album doesn’t change much after this. There are lots of classical music influences and touches and some songs get very near some 1980’s AOR songs as done by Journey or Survivor. Of course, there are some ballads as “Always with You” sugared with beautiful piano passages. The following “Dying for Love” has an intesresting keyboard intro and a guitar phrase that stresses all the emotion the band wants to pass to the fan. In its following the song gets a bit harder as a power ballad.

“The Force Within” will ctach the attention of Power Metal fans that like a more classical aproach with touches of the 1980s art rock and AOR.

Cristiano Filippini’s Flames of Heaven “The Force Within” will be released on January 08th via Limb Music.

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