LAND OF BROKEN HEARTS

Land of Broken Hearts is the debut full-length studio album by Danish melodic heavy metal/ power metal/ progressive metal act Royal Hunt. The band was founded in 1989 by keyboardist and main composer André Andersen and released this debut album in 1992. The album was originally released by Rondel Records and featured 12 songs. The album has been re-released by Majestic Entertainment and marketed by Steamhammer with 3 additional bonus tracks. The bonus tracks are acoustic versions of 3 of the songs from the album.

The music on Land of Broken Hearts is not progressive metal as I see that genre, but more a power metal/ symphonic heavy metal album with a few progressive leanings. One of the dominant features in the music on this album are the many neo-classical elements. Those elements are mainly played by the keyboard but the guitars ( which on this album are mostly played by André Andersen in addition to him playing the keyboards. The lead guitars are played by Jacob Kjaer though) are also an active player on the album. The tracks are mostly song oriented with big fat ( lots of choir) anthemic power metal like choruses and the instrumental parts which by the way are brilliantly played never overshadows the main focus in the songs which is the song melody.

The musicianship is excellent and tight. Lead vocalist Henrik Brockmann has a great powerful voice that suits the music well.

The production is not a fully professional production to my ears but it´s rather enjoyable anyway. Producer on the album is no other than André Andersen. He seems to have done just about everything on this album. Well almost everything.

Land of Broken Hearts is a good debut album by Royal Hunt and I´m quitesurprised at how much I enjoy this album even though I do find it overall a bit cheesy but I guess that comes with the genre. Some people love it and some people hate it. I´m a bit biased towards those anthemic choruses and the general very simple song structure but as I said above it works pretty well here and while listening to the album for the first couple of times I was actually in doubt if I was gonna rate it 3 or 4 stars but I´ve settled with BIG 3 star rating. A nice surprise.