Pretty good for debiut, very scandinavian sound. I hope you don't mind few notes, it's for good, from the heart
- mix needs to be slightly more punctual - especially Blackthorn has few moments when drums go one way, guitars the other, vocal can't recitate text fast enough and there was even no bass section to double point what exactly happened in faster moments. Fortress is much tighter between sections but vocals still had a bit of lag. This still would be pretty good for live performance, but for studio mix and mastered demo this has to be spot on - there is plenty of software to help you straighten those things - so - no excuse.
- the guy on vocals. You can clearly hear he is very confident and very promissing in middle registers - when he goes lower he manage pretty good melodic lines and adds few nice details here and there. I think he's comfort zone, in terms of range is somewhere between Mike Patton and Nick Holmes, however when guitars force him to go Bruce Dickinson high, it's a bit of a car crash. There are vocalists that can reach the high breaking point and just let it be carried by vibrato on the last reachable semi tone - Bruce Dickinson does it now when they perform old songs - he can't go as high anymore so he goes only as high as his secondary backing vocal used to do it studio recordings and sustains that phased note to let your imagination add "the high C" you remember from album. Then there are those that will let their voice reach high breaking point and break it gracefully and interestingly - Phil Anselmo to name but one. However when your vocalist runs out of scale into slightly throaty head voice rather than let the last reachable note to be carried by diaphragm it becomes a teenage squeel which only suits Megadeth tributes - in other words - it's not pretty. So don't force him to go there. Either write for his scale or if melodic lines absolutely require large scale bravados use set of guitars detuned to his scale. Let him go lower and in few months he will find perfect middle and lower tone comfort zones. He's good, but very high registers are just not his thing. If it's too high for him now, in few years time you'll never be able to play those songs.
And rhytmatics - you have to get him to excercise tempo and rhytmic pronounciation. Get him to rap with metronome if you have to or excercise with him singing slower accenting every second or fourth riff and then gradually build up tempo.
Keep rocking
