TORIAN – The Lost Legion Rising

vote
6.0

• Bands:
  TORIAN
• Duration: 01:00:16
• Available from: 05/08/2026
• Label:

• Massacre Records

Even if we only discovered them recently, Torian – a German power metal band – have been active for twenty-five years. As often happens, the first phase of their career was quite prolific: until 2012 the group had in fact released three albums in just seven years. Subsequently, however, the creativity of the band seems to have suffered a sharp slowdown, given that even fourteen years passed before arriving at the subsequent “God Of Storms” and the present “The Lost Legion Rising”.

Time passes, things change, but what has remained decidedly stable is Torian's music. Born on coordinates strongly indebted to the more melodic Rage and the first Blind Guardian, the German band still continues to move along those paths today; However, it would be ungenerous not to recognize a certain evolution. The beginnings, recovered by us for the occasion, certainly appeared more raw and essential, built on immediate melodies and sustained but not particularly fast rhythms. Over the years, the proposal has gradually enriched, leading Torian to increasingly resemble a still immature version of the current Orden Ogan, probably also thanks to the presence of Seb Levermann – leader of the aforementioned – behind production and mixing.

More robust, more epic and also more modern: this is how the Torians of 2026 present themselves, and the opener/single “Soul Vampires” makes this immediately clear. A powerful and catchy song, indebted to the Blind Guardian lesson of “Follow The Blind”, with a touch more elegance on a formal level, but, at the same time, with a decidedly lower dose of creativity. Over time the proposal has become less instinctive: the speed rides of the past, although still present (the telluric “Sons Of The Damned” demonstrates this well), now leave more space for rocky and anthemic midtempos such as “Lost Legion” or “Iron Hammer”, to name two songs among those that have left the greatest impression on us.

The rest of the album, unfortunately, struggles a bit to stay on the same levels: it's not so much about originality – a problem now common to a good part of contemporary power metal – but rather about the intrinsic difficulty of some episodes in keeping up with both songs by other bands and the best moments of the same tracklist. The ballad “Stand As One”, for example, is perhaps the most obvious case: the impression is that of listening to a faded version of “Glory To The Brave”, with the difference that here the vocal charisma of Joachim Cans is missing and that even the epic chorus only partially manages to leave its mark, sounding a little tired and dull.

Wanting to look for an artistic comparison, “The Lost Legion Rising” can be seen as the reproduction of a famous painting: formally correct, even pleasant to look at, but incapable of really explaining why one should prefer it to the original. Of course, if you don't have access to the main work, even a good reproduction can suffice; but in the age of streaming platforms and immediately accessible music, however, this discussion inevitably becomes more complicated and leads to legitimate thoughts that cannot help but influence the final grade of a review.

This doesn't mean being faced with a mediocre work or something to be discarded completely: the album has its limits and its banalities, but it also contains some successful episodes – the epic “Katharsis” above all, or the beautiful opener – which demonstrate how Torian still knows how to write good power metal when they find the right balance between melody, impact and atmosphere.