Intergalactic Battle Tunes...Stories from Behind the Dark Side of the Moon to the Milky Way and Beyond!

Sculforge is a relatively new band (formed in 2020) stomping down the power metal gas pedal on their debut album Intergalactic Battle Tunes. The title is actually much longer, a nod to the streak of humor running through Sculforge's songwriting, but I'm not writing it out, it's easy enough to look up. Power metal with sci-fi lyrics should bring to mind bands like Gamma Ray and Iron Savior and you'd be in the ballpark, but Sculforge play a lot faster and that speed plus the squealing solos and the fact they obviously don't take themselves too seriously brings a bit of early Dragonforce to the influence party. Intergalactic Battle Tunes has some good songs, if you like catchy melodies played at the speed of light, and tracks like "Spacehull" and "A New Hope" sure got my feet hitting the air bass drums under my desk. Overall there's plenty to like here, but in the negative column are a LOT of spoken word narration pieces between the songs that move the story forward in an obvious fashion, but they also mean the album is very long, nearly 70 minutes. As I slogged through Intergalactic Battle Tunes, I kept wondering if it would have worked better as two separate full-length albums. I don't like long albums, though, so that may not be a hindrance to everyone. If you are fan of the bands I mentioned already, you should give Sculforge a listen to see if their take on speedy, sci-fi power metal works for you.