Okay so what have we here ? A band hailing from Ukraine. There definitely seems to be metal talent in this country. This band could simply be categorized as a clone of Blind Guardian, but without falling into copycat.

While I can appreciate a band that gets inspired from another and release something in the same vein, like Fatal Crisis does, I usually don't like typical copies of other bands, and I don't think it would be fair to call them copies, as none of the songs seems copied, it just sound like a lost album of Blind Guardian, and damn good one at that ! It isn't produced as well as their inspirational source, and there are differences in the arrangement (like the very electronic break on Rising Sun). And well, while it is clear their singer tries to imitate Hansi Kurch, he still has some way to go to manage a similar level (sometimes he is right on the money, sometimes he falls completely off unfortunately). But for a first album, I'm still impressed and intrigued. Most songs are very fast ones. In the end this album is fast, furiously fast, clocking sometimes 20-30% faster than the fastest Blind Guardian songs (that's particularly clear on the song Rising Sun). Victories & Defeat start with a similar effect of back vocals that you would find on BG's Bright Eyes, to a point where I thought we approached copycat, but the song goes to a completely different path and delivers the most bombastic chorus of the album ! The melodies are flying all over the place and this song is a mind twister on it's own, a progressive song that clocks at almost 9 minutes. There is definite originality within the band, and they have great guitars but probably would require a (much) better production, better drum sound and some hefty progress on the singer' side. Overall songs are very long, with only 8 songs (1 intro), they range from 5 minute for the shorter one (actually there is a middle clean vocal track that is a bit more than 2 minutes in the middle of the album) to 9:25, most songs being clocking around 7-8 minutes, for an album with almost an hour of material.

In the end I think it will be a hit or miss for many people, some will be delighted to hear some material in the veins of Tales of the Twilight World (with a faster tempos sometimes, think Blind Guardian meets Dragonforce), while I'm sure others will discard it as a copycat band. If you like Blind Guardian of old, and would like to hear a band that definitely pays tribute to the source of it's inspiration, and can put aside the production (it could definitely use some polish) and some mix issues here and there as well as the inconsistent vocals, you might very well enjoy this band. I know I do, I hadn't listen to such great Blind Guardian for years :). Don't get me wrong, I love the last few albums but they don't grab me like Tales of the Twilight World, Somewhere Far Beyond or Imagination from the Other Side, while this Distant Fantasia does. I just wished the vocals were more consistent… (with better sound and better vocals the score would easily be 15 to 20 points higher).