album review: 'the shadow self' by tarja turunen

First off, some unfinished business: when I covered Tarja Turunen's last album Colours In The Dark way back in 2013 when I was first starting my channel, I'm fairly certain I mangled the pronunciation several times over, so I'd like to extend my apologies for that. 

But truth be told, that's probably the most I actually remember about that review - or most of that album, if I'm being brutally honest. I know, it's been three years, but I haven't really been inclined to go back to Tarja's solo work, even compared to what she did with Nightwish. And I'm not sure why that is - going back to Colours In The Dark, it's a damn good record, but with the exception of a few songs, it never really grabbed me in comparison with the symphonic metal I love, I probably overrated it a little back in 2013. Maybe it was the buzzy industrial effects that didn't always click or the songwriting that never quite came together, but Colours In The Dark very quickly fell into the category of being a record I really liked but not one I felt inclined to regularly revisit.

Well, it became clear that Tarja wasn't slowing down, even in the lead-up to this release dropping a EP called The Brightest Void with songs that had to be cut from her newest record. Hell, it was practically an album in its own right, produced by Tarja herself and featuring the sort of eclectic elements that she'd never touched before, from the horns and harmonica that dominated 'Your Heaven And Your Hell' to the creaking piano-driven glitchy atmospherics on 'An Empty Dream' and 'Witch Hunt', and that's not counting the Paul McCartney deep cut or the symphonic metal cover of 'Goldfinger' that completely misses the point and isn't nearly as good as you'd hope. But whatever, that was an EP of extras - now that we have the full album, how is it?

video review: 'ghostlights' by avantasia

Again, better late than never. And in this case, I'm happy to get it out, because this was a real welcome surprise.

In any case, Billboard BREAKDOWN coming up next, followed by that new Charles Kelley and maybe Pop. 1280 if I have time. But this weekend I'm going to be out of town, so it might be tight timing. Either way, stay tuned!

album review: 'ghostlights' by avantasia

So when I talked about The Mute Gods a few days ago, I brought how supergroups tend to market themselves - these people are attached to something you already know and like, and now they're working together, so you should buy that. In truth, that's one of a few ways, the second being a lot more complicated and unlikely: one artist with a defining vision recruiting a whole team of established artists in order to realize that grand plan.

Now some of you will inevitably point to hip-hop and say, 'Well, duh, we get this all the time', but this falls into a slightly different category, because how often do all those guest verses fit with the story or concept, presuming there's a story or concept at all. When you narrow it down like that, this list gets a lot smaller, and it also further divides into two categories, this time focusing on the man behind said project. Is he a musical genius capable of sketching out a vast world where every unique singer plays a distinct part, or is he simply an incredibly gifted networker who has some solid connections? In the former category in metal, the name that immediately jumps to mind is Arjen Lucassen, the founder of the progressive metal Ayreon project. And on the flipside, you have Tobias Sammet, frontman of Edguy and leader of the symphonic power metal project Avantasia.

Now I've been getting asked about my opinions on Avantasia since I mentioned that I like symphonic metal, but prior to doing this review, I had never really delved into them at length. So I took the opportunity to listen through their previous six albums and try to get a handle on the story that Sammet is writing - that's the big reason why this review is as late as it is. In short... I wish I liked this group a lot more than I do. Don't get me wrong, the group can often put together some spectacular symphonic metal songs, but the albums can feel pretty uneven, partially thanks to tracks not always doing enough to stand out from each other - with the exception of some godawful synth choices - partially because the writing can dip a little too often into metal cliche, and partially because the stories can get incomprehensible if you're trying to follow the plots. Now this upcoming record is following along from the story started on their 2013 project The Mystery of Time, a record aiming for grander symphonic presence, which focuses on a character in Victorian England falling in with what I'd basically described a steampunk machine cult. I definitely think it's a good, if hard-to-follow and frequently overwritten album, although I wouldn't say it always gives us their best individual songs, but apparently Ghostlights was going to be even bigger, even darker, even more grandiose... was that really the case?

video review: 'the astonishing' by dream theater

Another one that was long in coming, but I wanted to tackle it regardless. In the mean time, my schedule has gotten frankly insane, so I'm hoping to blow through a few releases fairly quickly. Sia first, then Pop. 1280, Avantasia and The Mute Gods, then Foxes and a few hip-hop releases that I have absolutely zero expectations for.

In other words, stay tuned! 

album review: 'the astonishing' by dream theater

...okay, so maybe Dream Theater was going back to their concept album days. I've been wrong before, I can own up to it.

But just so you all have context - my channel has gotten approximately seventeen times bigger than the last time I talked about Dream Theater in a review - when I covered their self-titled record, I made the comment that Dream Theater seemed to be charting a new direction, at least in terms of how they thematically structured their albums. And that made a certain amount of sense - the self-titled record was considered a return to form, charting a new era for the band.

But let's get real here: it was only a matter of time before Dream Theater returned to the well of a narrative-driven concept record. Hell, Metropolis Pt. II: Scenes From A Memory, which you can make a convincing argument was their best album, was a narrative-driven concept record, and that was seventeen years ago, so why not go for it again? Well, they definitely did: a double album, over two hours, with a full symphonic backing orchestra and dystopian narrative... but unlike on Metropolis, frontman James LaBrie was going to be playing all seven main characters characters. By all accounts, this is one of the most ambitious projects Dream Theater has ever attempted, and with the full support and budget of their label behind them, you had all the reason to believe this could be something really special, from veterans well over twenty years in the industry. Could they pull it off?

video review: 'haven' by kamelot

This review took WAY too damn long to get out, but I'm happy I did finally get a chance to do it before the midyear - which I'm steadily polishing up, btw.

But next up, Miguel, Vince Staples, Czarface, Tyga, King Los... whoa boy, lots of hip-hop and R&B, so stay tuned!

album review: 'haven' by kamelot

Back when I first got into metal in high school, I remember having a conversation with a fellow student who was a year or two older than me who was also into metal. I told him that I was listening to a fair amount of power metal and symphonic metal, and I remember him snickering and saying, "What, like Kamelot?" At that time, I was only just getting into the genre, so I had never heard of the band, so I went home and picked up what few tracks I could find, most of which were off of the band's 2003 album Epica. And I remember thinking that while there were a few songs I dug, the band just didn't impress me in the same way that Nightwish or Blind Guardian ever did. Sure, they weren't bad, but they didn't seem all that special to me. And just like my abortive attempt to get into the band Epica around that time, I put the band aside for nearly a decade.

Fast forward to, well, now, and I started getting requests whether I would cover the newest album from Kamelot titled Haven. And at this point, I was in the mood to hear some good power metal and I figured the band deserved a more complete re-evaluation, so I began working my way through the extensive discography of Kamelot and their almost dozen albums of material across line-up changes and nearly twenty years of existence. To me, the band started hitting more of their mark on their second album Dominion, with much tighter and cohesive tracks than their debut Eternity, which featured great guitar work from their one consistent member Thomas Youngblood but definitely needed work in putting together cohesive tracks, instrumentally and lyrically. But it wouldn't be until the replacement of their drummer and lead vocalist with longtime powerhouse Roy Khan that things would materialize more, with the next two records giving them a chance to get their bearings before the absolutely stellar three punch that was Karma in 2001, Epica in 2003, and The Black Halo in 2005. And let's make this clear, if I was looking for records to win a metal fan over on Kamelot, it'd be those.

After that, Kamelot went in a more aggressively heavy direction with their next two records... unfortunately to diminishing returns, with their 2010 release Poetry For The Poisoned probably being their weakest in over a decade. But that wasn't the only issue, as singer Roy Khan left the band due to burnout, something this critic can believe given how his vocals sounded on that last record. He was replaced Tommy Karevik for their 2012 album and their third concept record Silverthorn, which actually turned out to be a pretty damn solid return to form, even if it wasn't quite at their best. So, extremely late to the punch, I decided to dig into their follow-up three years later with Haven - how does it measure up?

video review: 'endless forms most beautiful' by nightwish

Another album from a favourite band of mine that just doesn't deliver. Not a bad record, but pretty far from great. Eh, it happens.

Next up, I think it's about time I finally get that Modest Mouse review done... stay tuned!

album review: 'endless forms most beautiful' by nightwish

Back when I reviewed Blind Guardian's most recent and pretty damn awesome album Beyond The Red Mirror, I made the comment that it was one of two bands that got me into metal, and without those bands, I probably would never have become a music critic. The second band was always more symphonic, more gothic, and a fair bit more complicated to talk about. Yep, it's time to talk about a band of which I've been a fan for probably over a decade, the first metal band I saw live, a band that has been around for less time than Blind Guardian but is substantially more difficult to talk about. Yes, folks, it's time we talk about the Finnish symphonic metal titan Nightwish, a band that began in a campfire conversations in the mid-90s and spiralled away into becoming one of the most successful acts of the genre. And for the purposes of this conversation, I'm going to divide their output into three distinct categories, categorized by their female lead singer: the Tarja era, the Anette era, and the Floor era.

Nightwish began more in the realm of acoustic-flavoured power and symphonic metal, and their late 90s output was a time of developing a refining a sound that would become iconic, buoyed by the sharply melodic songwriting of Tuomas Holopainen and the glorious vocals of Tarja Turunen. Tuomas was always the band's mastermind when it came to composition, and the choice not to go with a heavy rhythm guitar section meant that melody was placed to the forefront over groove. It wasn't until 2002 and the addition of bassist Marco Hielata that the darker gothic elements moved much closer to the forefront along with some of their best compositions like 'Ever Dream', but the metal landscape was shifting too, with the success of Evanescence suddenly opening up a window for similar sounding - and better - bands to break. Suddenly, the symphonic metal sound was commercially viable, and Nightwish rode that wave to their - at that time - biggest album Once in 2004. And going back to that album, while the seeds were planted for their later expansion, it's also a very compromised record in terms of the subject matter, and I'd argue only about half of that album is very good or up to their usual standard.

And that compromised vision certainly did bleed into the band, which fired frontwoman Tarja Turunen in 2005 and split the fanbase in two with the arrival of Anette Olzon, signalling the second major era for the band. It was a time that signalled even greater ambitions for the band, who ditched any pretense towards following trends and grabbed up richer musical influences wholesale for 2007's Dark Passion Play. And yes, while Anette was not as technically refined and powerful of a singer as Tarja, she balanced against the loose roughness and eclectic style of the album far better, which was able to get darker without needing gothic pretense. Where pretense did become a factor was in Tuomas' writing, which had always walked the line of being too clever and yet bitingly straightforward. And the while the symphonic element became more and more prominent, first with the inclusion of Troy Donockley on the pipes and second with the heavier usage of orchestras, inspired by Tuomas' love of film scores. So it almost seems logical that that their 2011 album Imaginaerum would be paired with a movie and feel even larger and heavier than the last. And it was, and while I could argue that the album was even more self-referential than usual in terms of themes and lyrics, it features some of Nightwish's best melodic compositions and was overall a fantastic release.

But the problems weren't over, and midway through the tour Anette was fired and replaced with Floor Jansen of After Forever. Now there's a lot of ugliness to that conversation and nobody looks good, but it led to Floor Jansen joining the band full time along with Troy Donockley for their next album. Unfortunately, drummer Jukka Nevalainen had to take a brief hiatus and his drums were instead recorded by Kai Hahto, of the melodic death metal acts Swallow The Sun and Wintersun. Also in that intervening time, both Marco Hielata and Troy Donockley participated on the progressive metal album The Theory of Everything from Ayreon, easily one of the best records of that year, and I had to wonder if any progressive influences would be creeping towards Nightwish, especially with Marco as a secondary writer. And then I heard Nightwish was going to be discussing themes surrounding evolution on the album, even quoting Richard Dawkins! Keep in mind that the majority of Nightwish's material seems to fit in its own universe, and the last time they came remotely close to getting political was 'The Kinslayer' back on Wishmaster in 2000! To put things in context, Epica spent almost a decade trying to refinne their political messages before getting it to work consistently - I had no doubts that Tuomas was a good songwriter, but he's playing in a very different ballpark here!

In other words... look, even as a fan, I had no damn clue what to expect from this. Nightwish aiming for an even heavier sound, stabbing outwards with new subject matter and with a good half of the band changed, I had no idea what to expect, especially considering I wasn't really in love with Tuomas' solo album he dropped in 2014, written around the same time as this record. But I'm still a fan and at the very least it'd be an entertaining record, so what did we get with Endless Forms Most Beautiful?

video review: 'the diary' by the gentle storm

Man, I wish this had been better. I mean, it's good, but it should have been awesome, and it's still a bit of a letdown. It happens even from the best.

Next up, Billboard BREAKDOWN, and then I have about four or five albums lined up in the queue I could easily cover. What to pick, what to pick... oh hell, I know what I'm covering, and you all should too. Stay tuned!

album review: 'the diary' by the gentle storm

I've been looking forward to this project since the beginning of the year.

Now long time followers of my reviews probably aren't surprised by this, but everyone else is probably perplexed by where this album came from, who this duo is, and why anyone should care. For those who don't know, The Gentle Storm is a project under the direction of Arjen Lucassen, singer-songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and creator of the Ayreon project, an ongoing progressive metal act that pulls in vocalists from dozens of the most critically acclaimed acts in symphonic, progressive, folk, and even extreme metal. One of his long-time collaborators is Anneke Van Giersbergen, frontwoman of The Gathering and who has worked with acts as varied as Devin Townsend, Within Temptation, and Napalm Death. Together, the duo decided in 2014 to collaborate on a new project, a double album under the name The Gentle Storm. Both discs would contain the same compositions, but one would be played entirely with folk and acoustic instrumentation and other was all-out symphonic and progressive metal - and both discs would tell the same story, an epic historical romance, one of the few times Arjen Lucassen has ventured away from the sci-fi epics that have been his purview.

Now on some level, I was skeptical of this. With the exception of Guilt Machine, I've had mixed results with Arjen's side projects and solo albums, having never been a big fan of Ambeon and Star One rarely hitting as strongly as I've hoped. Plus, the double disc format struck me as the duo hedging their bets - were the compositions really so strong that they'd be able to be transferred to entirely different instrumentation and maintain their impact? Granted, this isn't the first time Arjen has done this - the first Ayreon release The Final Experiment had an acoustic version as well - but I couldn't help but feel the record might be better if they had just selected the more poignant version of each track and interweaved metal and acoustic together.

But this was the format they chose, and I knew that Arjen Lucassen was a songwriter who had never made an outright bad album. This was a team of veterans in writing and instrumentation, and it certainly wasn't shying away from being an ambitious project, so I gave the double album my full attention - was it worth it?

video review: 'beyond the red mirror' by blind guardian

And the streak of great albums continues... probably will piddle out with this next review, but you never know!

Then again, it is Fifth Harmony... wish me luck, folks...

album review: 'beyond the red mirror' by blind guardian

I've said before that it's hard to talk about legends, especially as a critic and especially when you know these bands had a seminal impact on shaping their genre. But do you want to know what's even harder? Talking critically about musical acts that were so formative to my musical evolution that I couldn't imagine being a music critic without hearing this band, who I first discovered online in the mid-2000s on clunky fantasy fansites as making music to a favourite novel series I was reading at the time. At the time I was a teenager absorbed in the Dragonlance series of novels, and I discovered that at the time, two metal bands actually wrote songs surrounding some of the characters from those stories. I'll talk about the second band in a month or two, but the first... Now keep in mind at this point I pretty much only listened to pop, hip-hop, and country, with limited exposure to rock and pretty much no metal. And I had never gone through an 'angry white boy' phase, I had no reason to listen to nu-metal or metalcore or even much punk, but I was curious.

The song was called 'The Soulforged', the album was A Night At The Opera, and the band was Blind Guardian. It might have taken three or four listens, but I was hooked - and from there, I started listening to power metal and symphonic metal. The folk tinges pushed towards fantasy-themed acts like Blackmore's Night which led me to Deep Purple and hard rock and blues, and the explosive, fast-paced chugging riffs pushed me towards the greats of thrash metal and punk. The rest is history, but I can say this definitively - if it wasn't for Blind Guardian, I probably wouldn't have this channel today. 

And thus revisiting the band is a little daunting for me, half because of their reputation and half because I know so much of their music by heart. Hailing from Germany, they started out as a speed metal band in the mid-80s before transitioning into a more epic, fantasy-inspired scope with Tales From The Twilight World in 1990. Plenty of fans hail the Tolkien-inspired Nightfall In Middle-Earth as their seminal work from the 90s, but for me it's always been Imaginations From The Other Side - the perfect blend of their speed metal roots and the folk-inspired power metal they would evolve into, and a damn classic, at least for me. And that evolution reached its apex with 2002's A Night At The Opera, a title that matched the overblown Queen-like bombast of its sound that features some of my favourite Blind Guardian songs like 'The Soulforged', 'Battlefield', 'Sadly Sings Destiny', and of course the gargantuan fourteen minute 'And Then There Was Silence'. But the record really is indulgent, and a lot more uneven than one might expect. It was enough that their drummer Thomas Staunch left the band, dissatisfied by the change in direction for the band.

And by all reckoning, he might have spoken too soon, because Blind Guardian changed again in 2006 with A Twist In The Myth, with less over-the-top bombast and more for a straightforward, hard-hitting thrash feel. And not only was the production stronger, the drumming of Frederik Ehmke was more intricate, varied, and wasn't as reliant on triggers for drum fills, which I definitely preferred. It didn't always hit the high points of A Night At The Opera, but I'd argue it was more consistent and a lot tighter. Unfortunately, that didn't really carry over into their 2010 album At The Edge Of Time, which... yeah, it wasn't bad, but that tightness wasn't there, which meant the album had a lot of pomp and bombast, but not quite the great songs to really stick the landing for me.

But now, five years later, Blind Guardian are back, with Beyond The Red Mirror, an album that was being hailed as a sequel to Imaginations From The Other Side, my favourite Blind Guardian record. And let's be honest, it's been twenty years from that album, and if you're planning to make a sequel to one of the best power metal albums ever made, you had better do it justice? I have to admit, I was worried - did Blind Guardian pull it off?

video review: 'arms of morpheus' by kingfisher sky

I can't believe I keep forgetting these...

Ah well, next up is Big K.R.I.T. Stay tuned!

album review: 'arms of morpheus' by kingfisher sky

So here's an interesting situation: you're an technically minded musician, looking at pushing the boundaries of your craft, and you're part of a band that's on the precipice of breaking into the mainstream. And you know that if you start aiming to push for more complex progressions that are less commercially friendly, it could hold you back from that breakthrough. So what do you do - stick with simpler instrumentation that really aren't stretching you artistically, or forge a new path that will almost certainly be less commercially viable?

That was the choice Ivar de Graaf made when he left symphonic metal titan Within Temptation after their critically acclaimed album Mother Earth. And to some extent, it makes complete sense - Within Temptation were always a band with a keen eye to appealing to a more pop-friendly metal crowd, and de Graaf's desire to play more complex progressions and improve his compositional skills would almost certainly fly in the face of that. He still maintained a friendly relationship with Within Temptation and would occasionally play with them on later occasions, but in 2005 he collaborated with his wife Judith Rijnveld to form the progressive symphonic metal band Kingfisher Sky.

And here's the funny thing: listening through their debut album Hallway of Dreams in 2007, I definitely saw some real potential but I also was struggling to see the areas where Kingfisher Sky could stand out from the crowd. Keep in mind that not only did Within Temptation release The Heart of Everything that same year, Nightwish released Dark Passion Play in all of its folk-flavoured genre-bending might, and it's not hard to see how Kingfisher Sky might have been overshadowed simply for being quieter and having more restraint, their influences being less film scores and more Porcupine Tree, Kate Bush, and traditional folk. But I'd argue that being a little softer gave Kingfisher Sky a chance to develop their songwriting and acoustic textures, and while they did occasionally fall into cliche, they frequently were able to compensate for it. They followed that album with Skin Of The Earth in 2010, which was heavier and had tuned the songwriting a little finer, but it was at this point the lower production budget was definitely hampering the more symphonic side of the band, and while the guitars had crunch and some of the more progressive grooves were interesting, I found myself wishing that Judith Rijnveld was a more powerful vocalist or they could expand their sound into something with a little more import and scope.

In other words, I wasn't sure what to expect with their crowdfunded 2014 album Arms Of Morpheus - I expected to like it, but it's been a crowded year for symphonic metal. So how is it?

video review: 'z²: dark matters' by the devin townsend project

God, I wish this was better. It's still a good record, to be sure, but it just didn't quite land with me. Ah well, it happens.

Next up, I need time to get through my backlog of albums before I start the one of the heavier weeks of the year. Foo Fighters, Big KRIT, Azealia Banks, and more, so stay tuned!

album review: 'z²: dark matters' by the devin townsend project

And now we come to the second round of our Devin Townsend discussion, of the second disc and the one that definitely gripped more of the fans coming from Ziltoid The Omniscient. It was the sequel that so many of them had been asking for, the glorious return of Ziltoid and the madcap space insanity that had defined that album.

And yet, if I'm being completely honest, the more I thought about it the more I wasn't sure a sequel to that 2007 record was a great idea. Sure, there was undoubtedly more space to be tapped in the gloriously epic and epically silly saga of Ziltoid, but that album also ended in a way that didn't exactly leave itself open for sequels in the same way. It's similar to the sense of annoyance I had when I saw Disney's live action Alice In Wonderland directed by Tim Burton that actually turned out to be a sequel, couldn't be bothered to call itself Through The Looking Glass, and was a total piece of shit. Not spoiling anything, but when you transform what was designed as a pure flight of fantasy or madness into something grounded in a more concrete reality - you run the risk of breaking the joke.

And it seemed like Devin Townsend was running into problems too. A followup to Ziltoid was announced in 2009, and yet it took him five years to fully get the project to coalesce. He utilized the character on a satirical radio show in 2013 and bandied around the idea of a visual project, but this year he finally managed to pull things together for Z², and to placate the label he had to bundle it with a Devin Townsend Project album that actually managed to be pretty damn awesome. And even despite my serious misgivings going into this record, I have to admit I was still pretty damn excited for a new Ziltoid adventure - did we get it?

video review: 'z²: sky blue' by the devin townsend project

Part one was glorious, so let's see how part two pans out - stay tuned!

album review: 'z²: sky blue' by the devin townsend project

I've mentioned in the past that there are certain musical acts that have an insane work ethic, acts that will pump out distinctive, potent material that somehow manages to maintain a standard of real quality. Now from my observations, these acts tend to fall into two distinctive camps: acts that have a formula that allows them to subtly augment it with each release; and acts that simply have so many ideas that they have to let them all explode forth on project after project, with some of the ideas inspired genius, some merely inspired, and some that inspire headaches for all involved. In other words, there's a little less consistency in their output. And no, I'm not talking about Lil Wayne and his album/mixtape releases, today I'm going to talk about one of the more eclectic figures in metal, a Canadian musician who already dropped a country and blues flavoured record earlier this year and now has a full double album of progressive and extreme metal.

Yes, we're talking about Devin Townsend, formerly of the extreme metal act Strapping Young Lad and the frontman of the Devin Townsend project. He's a musician with a gift for versatility, a ton of explosive presence, and sheer oddball weirdness in his lyrics that can send many of his projects spiraling into madness, or at least be difficult to take them somewhat seriously. And to be fair, I get the feeling that Townsend recognizes this to some extent, as he's made some truly hilarious metal records that still manage to kick ass. I was first introduced to him through his 2007 album Ziltoid The Omniscient, a record about a power-mad galactic overlord searching for the universe for the perfect cup of coffee and with an ending twist that really shouldn't be as much of a fun surprise as it is. 

Now in terms of pure Devin Townsend albums, it was his last until now, but that didn't mean he wasn't active. Instead, after quitting booze and drugs, he embarked on the Devin Townsend Project, a series of five albums that showcased five different sides of Townsend's experimentation to varied amounts of success, the last being the more pop- and hard rock-flavoured Epicloud in 2012. So when I heard that he was coming back with a double album this year, a sequel to Ziltoid The Omniscient, I honestly didn't have the slightest clue what was coming. So I took several deep breaths and plunged in - what did I get?

video review: 'the quantum enigma' by epica

Well, this took a while to decode, but I'm glad I could pull it off.

Next up will probably be Sturgill Simpson and the Black Keys, so stay tuned!