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When I first got my hands on this, I played it so much my girlfriend almost threw it out of the car at high speed, so as you can gather, I dig it a great deal. Show Me How to Live is the eleventh record from Denmark's kings of neo-classical metal Royal Hunt, their first with reunited vocalist DC Cooper, who sang on their undisputed classic Paradox. Now, I fucking love DC. His work in Silent Force is unmatched, and I listened to Paradox so much I almost wrecked my stereo. So to say I was excited at the prospect of him rejoining the Hunt is an understatement.

The result was more than I hoped for, as this is the catchiest, most immediate album Royal Hunt have ever recorded. It's a short one, clocking in at just over 42 minutes, but every second of it is pure melodic genius. We have all the usual hallmarks of this band, from Andre Andersen's crystalline harpsichords and keys to DC's wailing vocals, but they amped up the heaviness in the guitar department and wrote some of their best choruses ever. Opener "One More Day" begins with a huge choir before launching into the best melody Stratovarius never wrote, "Half Past Loneliness" is possibly the catchiest thing ever released on the Frontiers label, and the massive ten-minute title track puts Queen to shame with a melody straight out of "The Show Must Go On". Beyond that, we have the double-kicked "Angel's Gone" and the somber "Hard Rain's Coming", another stirring highlight.

Production wise, things are ever so lightly uneven, favoring Andersen's keys over everything else, and DC isn't quite as powerful here as he was on Silent Force's Walk the Earth, but this is still a very fine release, so if a cross between mid-period Stratovarius and modern Kamelot sounds good to you, pick this up without hesitation.