Band:	Bejelit
Album:	Emerge
Style:	Power metal
Release date:	March 2012

01. The Darkest Hour
02. C4
03. Don't Know What You Need
04. Emerge
05. We Got The Tragedy
06. To Forget And To Forgive
07. Dancerous
08. Triskelion
09. Fairy Gate
10. The Defending Dreams Battle (Aruna's Gateway)
11. Deep Water
12. DefCon/13
13. Boogeyman

On the spectrum of shittiness, this falls somewhere in the bland, overpopulated middle. On one end of the map you've got an album like Morbid Angel's latest (which seems more like a misfire than anything), while on the other you've got everything done by the YouTube entity called Fadades (whose incompetence is, in every way, fucking preternatural). With this album here we've got ourselves a nice old heap of stale, sterile, and sappy, castrated power metal. It's neither misfire-like nor was it executed all that badly?it's just, from start to finish, the most thoroughly tedious kind of meh.

Put another way, it's power metal that's decidedly not powerful. Sure, there are moments on this that make me wish I still had 20-sided dice to throw at shit, but those moments are grossly outnumbered by moments that make me wish a level 51 paladin would just hurry up and put me out of my boredom-induced misery (the most useless kind of misery).

Giving credit where credit's due, some of the high vocals are actually decent, as are some of the more ambient inserts on this. They'll get the chills coming before the guitars start whizzing by. And chills are always nice.

But the moments on this that don't suck are quickly ruined by overly-melodramatic melodies, hiccuping riffs, and the cringe-worthy lower vocals. Fact is, the vast majority of this record is either unendurable or damn close to it. It's epic in the same way that a movie like Prince Of Persia is epic. Or, in other words, it tries to be epic, but, you know, isn't... at all.

Could Bejelit have done any better with this? I don't know and, frankly, this hasn't, in the slightest, compelled me to find out. There is something resembling potential here, but it's ruined by the sheer softness of this thing.

Highlight: "Don't Know What You Need"