Dr. Sammet and Mr. Also-Sammet

Let's rock!

When I was in the early years of university and still under the misguided impression that I had any sort of talent at chemistry, there was an instructional presentation that was infamous among the first-year students. It was called "Gas-Liquid Chromatography", and I actually still have a copy of it here after having utilized some sneaky means to extract it from the computer it was sitting on. It had been made by one of the technicians, self-admittedly after having just discovered Powerpoint, and was filled with as many special effects as he could discover in the Transitions menu and as many funny noises as he could possibly find on the Internet. One of the others in my year described it, quite rightly, as "the most disturbing experience of my life".

But there were in fact two very different versions of the presentation. The one that we had seen was called "Let's Rock!.ppt", but there was another one that had all the weirdness cut out so that they could show it to visiting academics, and it had the filename "Actually we're quite serious sometimes.ppt". And that difference in moods has never been replicated more perfectly than in comparing Edguy to Avantasia.

As you have probably been able to tell previously, something that I love about power metal is that it doesn't take itself seriously - or that when it does, it's through things like Rhapsody that are so exorbitantly laughable that the whole thing just works again in a sort of double bluff. But in a genre where you're allowed to just have fun, Tobias Sammet stands out as genuinely, certifiably insane. He seems to lead something of a Jekyll and Hyde existence, having two projects that run side by side - his 'normal' band Edguy is a brash, gloriously obnoxious Limozeen-alike which has never made any pretence at being anything other than ridiculous, but on the other side of his face, he runs a project called Avantasia which styled itself as The Metal Opera. Having said that, his merrily childlike nature still shows through here because what he seems to be doing is enacting some sort of Macaulay Culkin film, doing exactly what everyone would want to do if they found themselves with sudden rock stardom and bringing together as many of the names from the past and present as he can possibly get his hands on. Alice Cooper, Kai Hansen, Roy Khan, Eric Singer and the omnipresent Miro are just a few of the names that feature, and the list goes on and on - one of the few names that I could identify as missing from the list is Bruce Dickinson, but if you watch any of the following videos, you'll notice that he seems to be content with just having stolen his voice box instead.

Actually we're quite serious sometimes

As Avantasia, he most recently wrote a three-album story about the Scarecrow, a story about the life of an unstable musician who is possibly meant to be Syd Barrett from Pink Floyd. Though I can already feel this sentence isn't going to come out very well, The Scarecrow is the first album of the The Scarecrow arc (if you see what I mean), and throughout the entire album, the layers of metaphor extend even to the choice of singers that were brought in to perform each part, creating wonderful moments when you realize exactly how each character aligns with their voice's own history. The mood is fairly dark throughout the trilogy, chronicling a series of bad decisions made by the main character as he's tempted by various personal angels and demons, though at the same time it features videos that are set up to blatantly get across the message of "Look at me, I'm playing the bass alongside Klause Meine!"

This, however, is worlds apart from what he gets up to as the frontman of Edguy. One of the highlights of their usual mood is this song about a rabbit from outer space, which is a tribute to one of their members, a drummer with the truly unbeatable name of Felix Bohnke. It wouldn't have been quite so remarkable if it had actually been called, say, "High-Speed Alien Drum Bunny" instead of its actual title, "Save Us Now", as it seems to imply that he thought that this really was a normal thing to write a song about.

Tinnitus Sanctus, then, is an album with a deliberately overly pretentious name and a vague focus on religion throughout (though it's rather difficult to tell, for reasons that will become clear later). It's actually unusually slow for power metal throughout, but is one of the most... relentless albums that I've heard in a long time - it sounds extremely loud even when played quietly. The only real calming-down period it gives the listener is the extraordinarily Bon Jovi-esque Thorn Without a Rose, but it picks up again straight afterwards, eventually concluding with Dead or Rock, an unabashed celebration of rockstar crassness that would make even Judas Priest blush.

Given this, it's very surprising that the same musician wrote that and The Scarecrow - you still couldn't call it anything other than a metal album, but it features much more of the piano and orchestral instruments (which Mr. Sammet has advised you to insert into your posterior in the link not a paragraph above). Even in its faster moments it sounds... nicer, more majestic than brash, with the highlight probably being Shelter from the Rain (incidentally the 274th time that Michael Kiske has come back to metal after leaving it forever). The longest song and centrepiece of the album is the title track, which builds up from a Celtic violin-led introduction into a slow and majestic piece with vocals shared between Tobias, Kiske and Jorn Lande. In the middle, it breaks off into a quite beautiful classical section from Mr. Rodenberg and his Symphony Orchestra.

Contrast this with the longest song on Tinnitus Sanctus, which is called Speedhoven. From the pun in the title, I assumed that it would be a classical tribute Yngwie Malmsteen sort of thing - and it does include a couple of bars of his Fifth Symphony in a demented sung "NA-NA-NA-NAAAAAA, NA-NA-NA-NAAAAAA" form, but it's instead a complete song in its own right. And even after listening to it and examining the lyrics multiple times, I have no idea what the cobblers it is meant to mean. As we have discussed before, the art of good songwriting appears to be equivalent to that of not saying what you actually mean, but if that's the case, then this stands out as a remarkable example of overdoing things. Jens Ludwig, the man with the Germannest name in the world, has said that it's about Beethoven's deafness and defiance of his critics, but I'm not sure if he was reading the same words that I was, because what's actually sung bears very little resemblance to any of this description. Even the songs in which the meaning is marginally clearer are impressively mental, with any message or meaning obfuscated through the liberal application of gibberish.

However, what I realized throughout my exploration of these two albums is that even though he is clearly barking mad, Tobias Sammet is capable of using this madness to get across a message each time - the difference seems to be in how much it's disguised. Therefore it would frankly feel wrong to conclude any thoughts on these two with anything other than The Pride of Creation, a song which on one hand is a commentary on the pointless conflicts of religion and contains what might be my favourite line from anything ever - "Hey lord above! Why don't your armies ever smile" - and which on the other hand chooses to phrase its point by having a chorus that opens with "You're alive, said the maker, and smiled at the aardvark". It is a wonderful ode to any God's obvious madness and humour shown in so many of his creatures and the world in general, only failing to mention the further evidence for his sense of humour in that God also created Tobias Sammet.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MCVUjlHAtU