Formative Albums 3 - Epica by Kamelot

[davidn]

In the early 2000s the music industry was at war with the Internet. Peer to peer sharing programs like Napster and Kazaa were making redistribution of music (not to mention viruses) easier than it ever had been before and the lost revenue was preventing Lars Ulrich from buying a fourth yacht. Noise Records was one of the first record labels I saw really embracing this wave instead of pushing against it, with a tagline of "Download, Burn, Spread". For each album they released, you could go on to their site and get a ZIP file with a song or two as well as cover and disc artwork and so on, to print your own copies of a single at home which you were encouraged to give away everywhere. It was a concept very much like shareware music, before people stopped caring about physical media entirely and everything was put on Youtube instead.

Iron Savior was the band that led me to discover the Noise Records site, but on it I found an absolute goldmine of similar bands in the power metal genre. One of the other standouts was Kamelot, with a K as in Mortal Kombat. Unexpectedly given the stupidity of their name, they had a more sophisticated kind of flavour to their music - still heavily guitar-based but with the addition of orchestrations, piano parts and experimenting with traditionally non-metal instruments that I'd never even heard of like the bandoneon and djembe. Vocalist Roy Khan also had an unusual tone for a metal singer, very smooth and measured compared to the vocal acrobatics that are more characteristic of the genre.

This particular album was about to be released when I first discovered them, and I think it remains my favourite - Epica is the first of a two-part adaptation of Faust, and continued my fascination with music that told a story. There's such a variety of different styles here, each song having its own unique characteristics.