Silent Knight are a "bandcamp" band from Australia and I stumbled upon them purely by accident. They play a very old school traditional style of Power Metal and do it quite well. So well in fact, that I was blinded to a few things that would normally cause me to cringe. After marinating with Conquer And Command for a few weeks and checking out the band history, I've since settled down a bit.

First, let's get the negative out the way. The band name itself, Silent Knight evokes hardcore Christian metal vibes. You almost expect a bunch of goody goods who go to church every Sunday and love Christmas carols so much they started a band. Then it has the word Knight in it as a play on words. THEN, the band mascot is a fucking generic looking wizard. NEXT, they seriously have dragons on album art non ironically in 2015. FINALLY, the drums sound like a shitty GPro "realistic engine" patch to me. Especially the awful snare drum sound. Once you realize what it is, it becomes distracting. Thankfully, other than the fake sounding drums, most of the aforementioned gripes are cosmetic. Other than changing the name, they can stop using dragons and wizards on album covers and no one should get their creative feelings hurt too much.

Now the good stuff. Aside from the complaints about the drums, everything else musical about this is pretty damn great. The guitars are aggressive, fast, melodic, and heavy. There's a definite Euro Power Metal feel ala Gamma Ray and Manticora as opposed to the triplet frenzied thrash attack of Iced Earth. The double bass drums don't sound as shitty as the snare and they are pummelling and constant so they fit well with the fast guitars. Vocals are high and soaring without bordering parody. The instrumental intro A Call To Arms is an actual real song with lots of guitar harmonies and isn't ambient noise! I bet they actually play this live when they open shows instead of having it played from a tape! And there's no ballads! Hooray! Someone in the band gets that most metal bands suck at writing ballads and most metalheads don't care about them anyway! Only people who write shitty ballads care about them! So many exclamation points! So many overly strong opinions! As for the songs themselves, they are primarily fast, as in Running Wild fast, which is how I like it. While each one has its own identity, if you like what you hear within 90 seconds of pressing play, you'll like the whole album. Kinda like sitting down to one big gigantic rib eye steak and a monster loaded baked Potato. There's alot of what you like, and you probably aren't going to find any surprises in three pounds of steak and 'tates. The only crappy song is an unnecessary cover of Europe's The Final Countdown. Kind of like if it were a ballad, no one cares. This song is overplayed, done to death, and the "haha" irony factor is so obvious it's cringey. Cover Cherokee instead. The preceding number Power Metal Supreme is the best way to end this heaping platter of metal. Whoever decided to include the cover as the last song shouldn't be allowed to make cover song choices anymore.

Coming across Silent Knight was an unexpected surprise and has gotten me to check out bandcamp for even more metal. Until recently, I primarily used the 'Camp for listening to and buying music from electronic artists. Hearing quality music from up and comers in the world of metal is a nice find. However, looking at Silent Knight's discography it seems they might have stalled out for the time being. Other than Conquer And Command they only have one other full length release and it's been re-recorded within a five year time span. Since 2015 they seem to have been silent (aha. aha. aha.). I for one, do hope they come back, but with better sounding drums and no more wizards and dragons and literal knights on the album covers.