Metal Maidens (The Netherlands) - 10/10
SERAPHIM hails from Taiwan and they consist of Pay on vocals, Kessier on guitar, Jax on bass and vocals, ?Evil? Dan on guitar and Simon on drums.

Guest musician is Maggie on keyboards. The additional players on the album are Pay, Chala, Deen and Jimmy Sun on keyboards, Chun Chen on clarinet, Du Kuan Chang on violin, Hong Hsang Chu on violin and Lin Meng Ying on cello.

The additional players learn us that the sound of SERAPHIM is bombastic and full of orchestral arrangements. But above all, they sound fresh and surprised me with their great song structures.

Twelve long epic songs fill this CD, that contains over seventy minutes of heavenly power metal. If you want to know which style they play, I would like to come up with names like NIGHTWISH, WITHIN TEMPTA-TION, DARK MOOR and STRATOVARIUS. But I would like to add, that SERAPHIM is definitely heavier than all these bands.

They already showed to have a lot of potential on their debut album ?The Soul That Never Dies?, but I think that ?The Equal Spirit? is a giant step forward. The CD is full of adventurous speed and mood changes and can be seen as one big fantasy trip through exotic islands. No, I am not drifiting away on a pink cloud here. This band has just that little bit of something, that I miss with bands such as WITHIN TEMPTATION and NIGHTWISH - no matter how good and professional they are!

I predict a great future for this band, especially with the sabbatical year of NIGHTWISH. I hope that the fans will pick up this band. They?re ready for their big breakthrough, if you ask me.