Skylark - Fairytales (2005)

For all their faults, it would be unfair to accuse Skylark of recording the same album twice. After 2004's WINGS, one of the more unusual power metal records one is likely to find, comes Fairytales, which brings back the fast tempos, but also changes things vocally. While WINGS was dominated by male singing, this has Kiara doing most of the duties, at least until the latter part, and she does pretty well (bearing in mind vocals have never been one of the band's strong points).
Skylark has always been about as heavy as cotton wool, with little in the way of guitar solos, and nothing's changed there, with such keyboard instruments as organ, piano and harpsichord prominent, but the shifts in time signatures and nice little melodious passages here and there keep things interesting.
The problem comes when they go for the long tracks.  "Lions Are The World" is eleven minutes, and is pretty good, but goes on too long, and has dumb lyrics. "Little Red Riding Hood", which comes near the end (after a reasonable cover of Mike Oldfield's "Moonlight Shadow", which is pretty good, but would have been better without the moments of male roaring), and has Fabio Dozzo doing the singing, is eighteen minutes, and just doesn't work. The problem is, the band just does not have the musical ingenuity to warrant such lengths, so we're treated to passages of tedium that offset the positives found earlier.
But, no matter what they attempt, Skylark continues to intrigue me, and has me wondering just what they're going to come up with next.

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