Doro's latest celebration of all things heavy metal brims with power, pride and passion

Horns in the air! Conqueress - Forever Strong And Proud is the 14th album from Metal Queen™️ Doro

By Geoff Barton
( Classic Rock )
published
Doro: Conqueress - Forever Strong And Proud cover art
(Image: © Nuclear Blast)

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Peters And Lee. Renée And Renato. David Van Day and Thereza Bazar. If you're a sucker for a bit of cheesy male-female duettin' action, you're gonna love it when veteran German metal queen Doro Pesch teams up with (wait for it) Judas Priest's Rob Halford on (drum roll) the Bonnie Tyler/Jim Steinman chestnut Total Eclipse Of The Heart. 

We kid you not. It's right here on track 15, and it's the guiltiest of guilty pleasures. A little bit Warlock, a little bit Walsall, a killer combination. (FYI: also included here is a terrific Doro/Rob version of Priest's Living After Midnight.) 

So is the rest of the album a powder keg, and does it give off sparks? You betcha. Doro knows her heavy-metal - and then some. 

From lumbering NDH-style opener Children Of The Dawn, via the revved-up-and-rampant Lean Mean Rock Machine, to giant ballad Fels In Der Brandung, the entire caboodle brims with power, pride and passion.

Geoff Barton
Geoff Barton

Geoff Barton is a British journalist who founded the heavy metal magazine Kerrang! and was an editor of Sounds music magazine. He specialised in covering rock music and helped popularise the new wave of British heavy metal (NWOBHM) after using the term for the first time (after editor Alan Lewis coined it) in the May 1979 issue of Sounds.