| 1. Overture 2. Until We Rise Again 3. How Many Miles 4. Scarlet Rose 5. Out of Control 6. Vain Glory Opera 7. Fairytale 8. Walk on Fighting 9. Tomorrow 10. No More Foolin' 11. Hymn |
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| All right, I'll be brutally honest with you - originality means
zip to me. Whatever a band sounds like, 95% of the time they're gonna wind up sounding
like somebody else, and from there on rises that nasty little word called originality.
Well, I don't care if a band sounds like Judas Priest, Helloween, Black Sabbath or 1910
Fruitgum Company as long as their music retains...shall we say...valor. Yes, every once in
a while there come along awful ripoff artists - Nocturnal Rites, Drakkar, to name a few,
and their much-less-than-good music is often excused on the account of "lacking
originality"; truth is, people - it's not that - granted, that's part of their style,
but nowhere near the basis of the problem - the problem is as always, lack of good song
writing. And thankfully this disc does NOT have that problem! Edguy comes across as an extremely young German band and delivers a disc full of a whopping 51+ minutes of power metal. Yes, you're right, Germany has indeed bred many many metal bands, some great, some solid, and some quite weak...and Edguy falls into neither of these categories - head and heels above most bands of the German metal ilk, they manage to sound fresh, technically splendid, and intriguing - and all this without an ounce of originality. While borrowing strongly and mainly from Helloween, they often delve into Blind Guardian-esque influences (hell, Hansi Kursch even guest stars on a track or two here) as well as those of Stratovarius (well, come to think of it, Timo Tolkki lends his heavy hand on one track as well - that says a lot right there); and yes, they DO sound like all three of these bands, yet their sound shows an amazing song writing skill, something truly incredible for a band whose oldest member is just 21! Yes, as you can imagine, Edguy is extremely talented across the board - singer/bass player/keyboardist Tobias Sammett might still need to hone his voice just a tad more, but here he comes across as an extremely deft mixture of metal's greats - Bruce Dickinson and Geoff Tate; it's a really fun voice to listen to, and it suits the songs perfectly. Guitars provided throughout are stellar - I'm not sure whether the two guys share their soloing duties or such, but whoever is responsible for the one in "How Many Miles" deserves a shrine! Well, and finally there's the drumming - for some odd reason I've been noticing a surprisingly increasing amount of sub-par drummers in several bands, old and new, and thankfully this guy is not one of them - he can deliver slow and mesmerizing...err...pounding, great double bass, and basically the whole enchilada - very talented guy, and very much suited for the band. |
| The amazing achievement here is the improvement level between
this disc, and their first, 'Kingdoms of Madness' released a year or two back, when the
guys were most likely still in high school. No more stiff melodies, overused sub-par riffs
and screechy solos. The songs can flow, mesmerize, and delve into your deeper subconscious
(well, to an extent), and there's of course the production, which is simply brilliant... And there are the songs, yes; terrific stuff here. The symphonic opener "Overture" sets the grande, theatrical pace for the entire disc, a pace which maintains it's prowess from there on, and hardly falters. As I've mentioned earlier, a lot of the songs exhibit Helloween influences - in particular "Until We Rise Again" and "Fairytale" - the former has a fast and free-flowing verse, plus a grandiose, epic chorus, and the latter just SCREAMS 'Keeper of the 7 Keys pt. 2' with it's sheer speed and multi-layered guitars. Two ballads present themselves, one of them unfortunately being the low point of the disc. Ballad #1 "Scarlet Rose" can rank up there with the best of them - granted, the formation is cliched as hell (slow verse, slow chorus, slow verse, bombastic chorus (variation of the same chorus), bombastic solo, reprise of the bombastic chorus, and a smooth slow down outro) but it's a splendid song - quite emotional and such. Unfortunately ballad #2 "Tomorrow" is, at least for me, pure boredom - it doesn't really build up to anything, and the whole imagery-scattered lyrics don't help much either. The title track really shows the band's skill - an epic mid-tempo piece, quite reminiscent of a slightly slower variation of Europe's "Final Countdown" (the main keyboard melody is an almost exact reprise of what is one of the most widely known hard rock melodies in the world), and the track has a majestic chorus going for it. Main problem is just HOW often it gets repeated at the end - which is ridiculously often, and of course responsible for the song's above-average length in face of the other material. The other two cuts worthy of a pedestal are the album's top tracks - "How Many Miles", "Out of Control" and "Hymn". An unforgettably driven verse in "How Many Miles" plus a flowing chorus, and that majestic solo I was talking about earlier - terrific track. "Out of Control" on the other hand features all those musicians I happened to mention a while back - Kursch screams out a few lines at the end, and Tolkki plays the solo. It's a fantastic track, probably the album's best, but it doesn't come off as sounding like anything else off the disc. And finally there's "Hymn", the cover of the old Ultravox songs - Edguy does something staggeringly phenomenal here - just hear 'em out - literally! There's some more stuff in the album - another mid-tempo piece called "Walk on Fighting" which is pretty standard and unexciting, and the cool "No More Foolin'" which sounds almost like a glam track (kinda like a rawer and heavier Skid Row perhaps). |
Yes, there are keyboards sprinkled in, but much like in Kamelot,
they don't discern from the fact that this is not prog - but is power metal, and great
power metal at that. Edguy still needs to polish a few rough edges (the lyrics for one),
but I can definitely see them as one of the bands to carry the torch of metal well and far
into the next century.
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