June releases

[davidn]

It's a very exciting time in the European metal world at the moment, because there are three bands releasing albums within a few weeks of each other over the next month.

The one I'm most excited about is "Megatropolis" by Iron Savior, the Gamma Ray side project-turned-real-band who got me started on all this in the first place. Despite sounding like the title of an early Genesis game, it sort of suits them, and I've been watching the recording studio reports and videos closely as they've been put up on the site. (They're a very "interactive" band in that way - not many bands visit and reply to their own forums quite so much.) While not as legendary or extensive as the introduction videos for Condition Red or the "director's commentary" series for Battering Ram, the videos do give some idea as to what to expect. Namely a more melodic version of Judas Priest, it seems.

On searching for the title on Google I came across some 30-second samples on a dodgy Russian site, and I was surprised to discover that (from my interpretation of the words) it appears that they've written a song about World of Warcraft. I'm not sure whether this is appalling or absolutely brilliant. Piet Sielck has the remarkable talent of being able to write supremely dodgy lyrics (rhyming "sword" with "restored", for one) and then making them sound not embarrassing at all. This might be because he's so massive and German that you don't really dare laugh at anything he sings.

Kamelot are also back with "Ghost Opera", which looks like a continuation of the general sound that they were exploring in The Black Halo. There's a video from the title song on the front page now, featuring a trademark 5/4-3/4-possibly 7/4 changing time signature, bullet-time hair-flinging and Roy Khan with an all-new record-breakingly stupid beard.

Their musical history is strange and difficult to explain - they started off several years ago with two absolutely appalling albums fronted by Mark Vanderbilt, who sang like a dog chewing a toffee. After kicking him out along with their drummer, they started heading in a better direction, but it took a couple of albums before everything suddenly and inexplicably worked. At that point they became a sort of everything-band, able to write lighter and more aggressive music with equal ability. Then they started getting a bit too clever for their own good and ventured away from power into progressive metal, becoming a sort of "Dream Theater Lite" with pretentious symphonic musical self-references and connections to various points in a continuing storyline. It's a bit like what would happen if Russell T Davies started a band.

And Sonata Arctica are about to release "Unia". This time, samples are available officially rather than having to rely on Mafia-funded MP3 sites. From going through the samples, it seems that the band have calmed down considerably since the days that they were a more manic version of Stratovarius that succeeded in dramatically upstaging their main influence - I couldn't find a single fast song on there, and they seem to be relying on their slower, more string-led style now. As I expected, just like the previous album, the song with the silliest title is once again my favourite ("My Dream's but a Drop of Fuel for a Nightmare", or MDBADOFFAN, which sounds a bit like a kind of cake). It's also mildly disturbing to see that they're beginning to look a bit like Nickelback.

Comments

[kjorteo]

I'm...very underwhelmed by Unia, and I'm honestly saddened by that. Sonata Arctica is definitely on the list of my top favorites, and everything from Ecliptica to Reckoning Night was just fantastic. This seems...I don't know. Uninspired? It's hard to explain, but I didn't hear anything that stands out as a strong all-time classic. "My Dream's but a Drop of Fuel for a Nightmare" is okay, but every part of it just reminds me of some song of theirs that was better. It starts with a piano intro very reminiscent of "Shamandalie," and then seems to aim for more or less the same spot on the light to heavy scale in which "White Pearl, Black Oceans..." resided, though the chorus sort of sounds like "The Boy who Wanted to be a Real Puppet" at parts. Unfortunately, "My Dream's" is entirely forgettable compared to any one of the songs I just compared it to (even "The Boy," which wasn't exactly the #1 single off that album or anything,) let alone all three. Most of the samples seem like this, and it's just...sad. I love Sonata Arctica to death, but this sounds like they just ran out of ideas.

Then again, I should mention that words could not fully capture just how much I detested Mandrake the first time I heard it, but it grabbed me on the second time (which was actually the "Let's go ahead and listen to it one more time to make sure it still sucks before deleting it" listen,) and now it's one of my favorites. So who knows, Unia may grow on me too. Maybe. I really, really hope it does, at least. You have no idea how much I don't want to dislike a Sonata Arctica album.

As for Ghost Opera, that was a neat song--some of their stronger and more noteworthy songs like "Forever" or "Karma" or even "Center of the Universe" were better, but it was definitely passable. The video would be a lot easier to watch, though, if Roy Khan's "I'm singing now" face didn't look so much like he was passing a stone.

As for the progressive metal scene, I always feel like I'm missing something whenever anyone mentions Dream Theater. It's like the Dream Theater everyone describes when they're mentioned is wholly different than the one I actually heard when I got some of their songs on Pandora. Based on your description (along with the descriptions of everyone else who's ever told me about them,) I'm to believe that Dream Theater is some sort of epic progressive metal act not unlike Symphony X. What I actually heard was...well, I'll be honest with you; it was really bad alt-rock. So I don't know.

Oh, hey, that reminds me; Symphony X has a new album, too. The Divine Wings of Tragedy and V were absolutely outstanding, and The Odyssey was...not V, but it was good, so I'll want to see how this one turned out, too.

[davidn]

I know what you mean. On hearing the sample of the chorus of "White Pearl, Black Oceans" for the first time, I just got the feeling of "This - is - brilliant!" The rest of the album took a while to get into (I thought the title track was pretty weak at first, for example) but it grew on me. Throughout the Unia samples, I just found them... boring. What happened to Wolf and Raven, Weballergy, Ain't Your Fairytale, anything?

Have you ever heard any of Timo Kotipelto's solo work? "Coldness" is easily the worst album I own, being a mix of uninspired riffs and Timo's trademark misshapen lyrics.

Dream Theater have a few amazing songs, and quite a lot of over-clever progressive tuneless twaddle. I wouldn't call them similar to Symphony X - they're rather more like bands such as Pagan's Mind and Circus Maximus if you've ever heard of those (though that's an unfair comparison as those two bands were clearly based on Dream Theater themselves).

I wouldn't even call a lot of it metal - the second disc of Six Degrees of Inner Turbulence starts off as a classical piece, moves through light pop-rock, Queen, and almost System of a Down-style battering at times, and the second act (yes) of Scenes From A Memory has an inspired moment when it turns into a ragtime.

The "Scenes from a Memory" album and the second disc of "Six Degrees of Inner Turbulence" (one 42-minute-long song!) are my favourites of them, and I haven't got into much else. Individually, "The Great Debate" is a very intelligent song, though about seven minutes longer than it really needs to be.

[kjorteo]

Weballergy! To this day, I have no idea what in the name of all that's sacred and good the title is supposed to mean, but the song remains one of my all-time favorite Sonata Arctica songs. It was basically my introduction to them, actually. I had heard good things about them and decided to give them a try. I didn't know if any albums were any more or less representative of the band as a whole than any others, so I went with the compilation/best-of "The End of This Chapter." I figured if you're trying to represent an entire band with one album, you may as well pick a compilation/best-of. I played it, not knowing what to think, and Weballergy was the first [real] track on it, and absolutely blew me away. It's a simply amazing song.

Of course, then when I got into the rest of their albums, I found out that The End of This Chapter actually has a terrible selection as far as masterful songs that got left out. Where's Replica? False News Travels Fast? Last Drop Falls? Tallulah? Gravenimage? White Pearl, Black Oceans? Shamandalie? On the other hand, there isn't really anything that is on there that I think shouldn't be (except that if you're going to have an 8+ minute song anyway, White Pearl, Black Oceans probably would have been better than the titlular The End of This Chapter,) so I guess it's just a case of the band having too many incredibly strong songs to decide.

But yeah, too many incredibly strong songs to decide what goes into the compilation, then this? Sonata Arctica up to this point was so good that there were only a select few songs here and there that were misses, or at least that weren't strong enough to rise above "something you hear when you listen to the rest of the CD" status. ("Picturing the Past" off Ecliptica is about the only one I can think of off the immediate top of my head, but there may be others.) Then, all the sudden, (unless Unia grows on me in a gigantic growth spurt fit to rival what happened with Mandrake,) they seem to have actually made a whole album that was that uninspired. It's tragic.

As for Dream Theater, I don't know too much about them, except that Pandora tried to slip me about three songs from Train of Thought and two from Octavarium, and they all sounded like generic alt rock to me. Picture the nearest generic alt rock FM radio station you have near you. The one that overplays Slipknot, KoRn, Chevelle, Mudvayne, etc. What I heard sounded like it could have easily fit in there. Hence the extreme confusion when people refer to Dream Theater as progressive metal. I've encountered people that make that inference so heavily that they practically use "Dream Theater" and "Progressive metal" as interchangeable terms, like progressive metal is that firmly Dream Theater's scene. Huh? With stuff like what I heard? Uh, no....

(Personally, I think of Symphony X when I think prog metal, but hey.)

Since I adopted my whole policy of "download bands' entire discographies and then actually buy the albums I find myself liking," I haven't actually purchased any duds. The biggest leap of faith I had to take was with Avantasia, the Metal Opera Parts I and II, because there simply weren't samples of the damn things anywhere. Fortunately, they are absolutely amazing, so my blind faith paid off. So, that being said, I guess the worst album I own is probably Weathered. Hey, it was a Christmas present. That I didn't even ask for. Shut up. :(

[kjorteo]

Also, Reckoning Night's title track is just a three-and-a-half-minute instrumental lead-in to Don't Say a Word. There's only so much you can do with that, aside from possibly picking a different track to name your album after.