NIGHT MISTRESS – The Back Of Beyond

Night Mistress is an exciting new Power Metal quintet from Poland. Even though their debut album The Back Of Beyond was released well over a year ago, it recently caught the attention of Metal Express Radio. This was mainly due to the release of an amazing new song and video titled “Hand Of God” for their upcoming sophomore release.

Night Mistress was formed back in 2003 and ended up releasing a four-song demo in 2005 called Hand Of Miracles. The following year, they released a second demo titled In The Land Of The Freezing Sun. Before they completed recording their debut album in 2010, one of the songs from that session, “Children Of Fire”, was featured on a compilation album produced by an indie record label.

The sound of Night Mistress features a mixture of a modern day energetic and emotional Power Metal sound. Led by the very powerful and lively vocalist Krzysztof Sokolowski, Night Mistress contains many elements of classic Judas Priest style Metal, which is collaborated with an updated and more aggressive style. The standard twin guitar formula is performed with clean-cut precision from guitarists Arkadiusz Cieśla and Robert Kazanowski. All of the riffs and solos are performed flawlessly and professionally.

The vocal talents of Sokolowski are certainly reminiscent of Rob Halford, Ralf Scheepers, and Ripper Owens, however, he does have a distinctive unique quality that separates him from being written off as a copycat. First of all, the aggressive style in which he performs brings out a much heightened sense of emotion from the compositions. He typically uses a high pitched growl to get his point across. This is most evident during the track “Alder King”, which is a fast-paced song that is sung with a very assertive style and nearly invokes his inner Bruce Dickinson to pull off the passion of the chorus.

Sokolowski has a soft side to him as well. There is one poignant ballad featured on The Back Of Beyond entitled “Leaves Of September” where he performs the first part of the track with a slower, melancholy tone and then crescendos a ton of feeling and sentiment into a high-pitched chorus line. The track also features an amazingly passionate guitar solo that arguably makes this the best song on the entire album.

As a whole, The Back Of Beyond is a respectful album. There is immense talent with this band as they are able to compose and perform high quality music. Overall, the album is very safe; there isn’t any one thing that will blow you away, but it’s certainly a great building block given their potential. The Back Of Beyond is an enjoyable listen, but their best work is definitely ahead of them.