Rhapsody of FIRE!

It's been quite a while since I listened to any bands that were new to me. My personal favourite genre is even less easy to find in America than it is in Britain, where I could usually find something worth listening to at the music place in Dundee, and I haven't really been following the news about releases in Europe as much as I used to. In fact, America seems to have a tendency to get the Japanese imports of European albums rather than the original ones, which is nice for the bonus material but not for price or ability to read the booklet. Most discoveries are now thanks to Youtube's handy way of having virtually every song ever - some real videos, but most through someone with far too much free time and some video editing software putting together "anime music videos" for them.

So, as pointed out to me by kjorteo, Rhapsody of Fire are a band from Italy (a country which my album collection does not yet cover). I was vaguely aware of them before, and had previously thought that they were a classical/symphonic metal band with a slight leaning towards a fantasy theme. They used to be called simply "Rhapsody", but someone had decided that their name wasn't daft enough, or something along those lines.

But, name issues aside, their videos are what really make them stand out. Most power metal music videos are done in a silly, tongue-in-cheek or over the top way, but Rhapsody are something special - it seems that every video they make is so unbelievably terrible in concept, production and general execution that you'd be hard pressed to accept that they're the real ones and not the result of someone trying to get on to Beadle's Hot Shots.

My favourite of them has to be Power of the Dragon Flame. It opens with the lines "Our brave young warriors must travel to another dimension in time to recapture the Mystic Emerald Stone and restore the glory of the Kingdom", in a classic example of cutting up an RPG game master book and pulling random bits of it out of a hat. And as if that wasn't silly enough, it proceeds to show various shots of two baffled-looking girls descending stairs, wandering aimlessly through streets and riding on trains, intercut with shots of the band playing in the middle of a countryside railway. It looks like they found some old clips from a home video, stuck them together in Windows Movie Maker and added some explosions using MS Paint.

The one for Holy Thunderforce (I'm feeling rather embarrassed repeating these titles, by the way) is marginally better in that it looks like it was actually intended to be a music video and that the actors in it hadn't been kidnapped. But they tried to do an epic battle scene and hoped that no one would notice that they only had about twelve people to make it. The highlight comes at just before the three minute mark - it's not as obvious as I first thought because I must have just paused the video at the exact moment by coincidence, but during the brief flash of the knight on horseback, there's a medieval electric junction box clearly visible in the background.

Somehow they managed to get Christopher Lee involved later on in their career, and I can't describe the video for Unholy Warcry any better than kjorteo did. It features narration from the White Wizard himself, done up in what looks suspiciously like a paper crown from Burger King, going on about the emerald sword of the crystal angels or some other such silliness, complete with a scene involving rubbing what is unmistakably tomato ketchup on a skull.

Even the shots of the band, which most other groups manage to make fairly normal apart from Hammerfall's infamous "curling rink" moment, are placed in front of blue-screen effects that Knightmare was doing rather better twenty years ago, with explosions or meteors raining down in the background. But it's Fabio Leone (who could hardly have had a more stereotypical Italian name unless he'd been called Spaghetti La Cappucino) who steals the stage, by gesticulating wildly while singing to the extent that he's nearly knocked everyone else over by the end of each video.

With the level of hilarity caused by the videos, along with other stupid titles like "Knightrider of Doom" and "Steelgods of the Last Apocalypse", it's obvious that this band is the one that the members of Dragonforce most look up to. But the most annoying quality of Rhapsody is that despite all of that, musically they're really quite brilliant. They seem to be more melodic and diverse than their closest counterparts, and from the songs I've heard, I actually enjoy their music a lot if I don't pay attention to what they're actually singing. scellanis, you'd probaby love them too.

Amazingly enough, Christopher Lee decided that he wanted to work with them again, and they recently performed a duet of one of the songs from the album that he had narrated. This performance sets a record in that it makes him the oldest metal vocalist ever. (Although, seeing as Iron Maiden are still going, not by as much of a margin as you might think.)