Iron Savior - Paradise? Paradies?

I used to write posts about specific songs that I happened to be listening to all the time. However, the trouble was that nobody I knew at that time was remotely interested, and it was further compounded by the way that my journal was otherwise completely worthless back then, so nobody ever managed to get back to the islands of interesting posts before they couldn't take the agonizing self-pity any longer. But as kjorteo found a viable new format for them, gave me a task in the form of finding an accessible Iron Savior song, and especially as I know some people that might even appreciate it now, I'm going to have another go.

The theory goes like this. The Internet contains everything in the whole world. Therefore, Youtube should contain all the video in the whole world, and thanks in part to makers of dodgy "anime/animated music videos" or AMVs, it therefore contains all the music in the whole world as well. It seems that armed with a copy of Windows Movie Maker, anyone who's a fan of a particular programme or film and also a fan of a particular piece of music can stitch them together and upload it for the world to see, no matter how disparate the two were before (for example, Russell Allen and Jørn Lande went perfectly in somebody's mind to a Disney cartoon about some masked ducks). So showcasing music in the form of Livejournal's Youtube-embedding feature is really quite easy if anyone's performed similar surgery on it.

So the task was set, and I had to search through Iron Savior's back catalogue to find songs that people outside the German side of power metal, and perhaps even the genre as a whole, might appreciate. This is a difficult task as most of their songs amount to no-holds-barred sonic warfare - I came to power metal from Iron Maiden, who were in many ways a sort of prototype of the genre, so even though they're fast and aggressive the melodic quality of it balanced that out for me. And Piet Sielck, despite having a harsh voice that sounds like he's been smoking and drinking since he was five, really knows how to write choruses, and eventually I settled on one of his best examples of those.

The unusual thing about this song is that nobody can really agree on what its name is. On the album version I have it's called "Paradise" on the case and "Paradies" throughout the lyrics (and on Darklyrics as well as the band's site). I imagine that even though it could be said to be a play on words, using the German spelling of the name isn't deliberate, as it showed that the band didn't have a native English proofreader in those days and most of their booklets resembled Zero Wing. Whatever it's called, it's one of their more mid-paced songs, with a dark start giving way to the previously mentioned amazing chorus, and you don't even need to know any of the storyline for it to make sense. Unusually the video is vaguely appropriate (in that it involves space) - it's set to Michael Bay's synapse-destroying patriot-em-up Armageddon, so you can watch space shuttles managing to fly like Harrier jumpjets while listening to it should you want to.

Artist: Iron Savior
Album: Condition Red
Song: Paradi[es]/[se]
Visuals: Armageddon
And the other reason I chose this song is that the rhythm part is one of my favourites to play/murder on the guitar myself at the moment. Most of the backing to the opening and chorus doesn't involve moving about much, with just small bursts of fast fingering - enough to be challenging but not insurmountable for someone at my stage. When you get the run of muted notes just before the chorus exactly right, words cannot describe just how many billions of times better than Guitar Hero it feels.