Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Artist: Blind Guardian
Label: Nuclear Blast
Released: 2010
Length: 63:57
Rating: 4.5/5
The ninth studio album from Germany’s Blind Guardian! Did you miss them? Four years after “A Twist in The Myth”! Clearly the guys are keeping up their work rhythm of dropping an album every four years. Ever since 1998 and the release of “Nightfall In Middle Earth”! So they’re staying in shape. Hard-working, for sure. But creatively?
The predecessor to the new album, “A Twist In The Myth”, is, as you’d expect from a band with this pedigree, a very high-quality piece of work. But it wasn’t as thrilling on release as all its older siblings were. It served up more directness and triviality (and, because of that, predictability) compared to the outstanding “A Night At The Opera” (2002), with which Blind Guardian themselves set a benchmark that will be hard to ever top in terms of quality.
“At The Edge Of Time”, though, is an album that gets more than respectably close to “A Night At The Opera”. Even more: it’s downright cheekily challenging it. Once again 10 songs, each one a complete whole, none of them stingy with the wealth of messages in the verses. Mysticism, adventures and escapades in undiscovered worlds that await all the curious, at the entry points of dimensional gates that you, of course, have to find yourself. “At The Edge Of Time” is a new album with such a convincing atmosphere that there’s only one thing you have to do: put on your headphones, banish your thoughts, which is to say switch off your mind and ratio, and let yourself drift freely so the music can do everything for you! With the new album, Blind Guardian remain untouchable masters, whose bold will, defiance and inexhaustible spirit of exploration never let up in the musical vision of a unique sermon they’ve been spoiling us with for more than 20 years.
The new album is a masterpiece once again. No beating around the bush. A masterpiece that won’t just make the band rightly proud, but that every last fan and every music lover with an innate feel for perfectly crafted melodic catchiness will fall irreversibly in love with, packed with multi-layered harmonies and a motivic juiciness that never loses musical cohesion or its red thread for a second, even through the dizzying twists of its transitional passages. This is the familiar, enthroned craft of “Guardian engraved classicism”, where the orchestral-symphonic principle once again shakes hands, deftly and without creative limits, with the reach of Euro power metal.
The album’s strongest moments are the opening track Sacred Worlds and the closer Wheel Of Time, which, with their motivic variety, sudden swings of mood, wavy epic bombast and maximum use of every musical building block blended into a harmonically perfect mix, brush up against the character of a mini symphony, like And Then There Was Silence on the previous album. The energy of “A Night At The Opera” is with us across all 64 minutes of the new record! There’s the (expected) folk number Curse My Name, which fits perfectly somewhere in the middle of the album and wakes the listener from the storm of white-hot metal punch. This moment of release from the metal forces carries on in War Of The Thrones, which is composed and arranged in the vein of something like Harvest Of Sorrow (that chorus!). The organically minded weave of multi-layered harmonies in this song, commanded by Hansi Kürsch’s unique, sharp vocal approach, doesn’t bring even a hint of worn-out feeling, of copying past deeds, or of filler meant to simply pad out the album’s running time. Let me generalize: not one second is superfluous on “At The Edge Of Time”.
The character of the unique Blind Guardian sermon stays completely untouched this time too. All the trademarks are with us again! Blind Guardian were never famous for the bravura of individual virtuoso musical acrobatics. They always earned their appeal through unity and a kind of “brotherhood”, which was always the guarantee that all the guys are tuned to the same creative frequency when writing material and communicate brilliantly with each other in the dialogue of creating songs. The new album isn’t just a recap of what Blind Guardian have already said. The bold combinatorics of the leading motifs reveal that the band has kept its wit, sparkle, inspiration and freshness in its creativity! Of course, you have to take into account that the new album doesn’t bring a new step up in development. The freshness embodied in the phrasing of the finished songs is the essential trait of the Blind Guardian point, the one that guarantees that Blind Guardian haven’t yet turned into grumpy old farts, and that an untamed creative core of high artistic caliber still flows through their veins. Yes. Without hesitation we can talk this time about a second part (or sequel) to “A Night At The Opera”. Since I brought up the “step up in development”, that was aimed mostly at the associations with the band’s past deeds throughout the nineties. The new album doesn’t bring a developmental leap like “Tales From The Twilight World” did after “Follow The Blind”, or, even more vividly, the sequence of creative leaps to a higher level between the releases of “Somewhere Far Beyond” and “Imaginations From The Other Side”; instead it keeps the expressive reach at the high-quality level of “A Night At The Opera”. The album offers 10 different songs that evoke the energy of that predecessor, and that’s enough to talk about a new Blind Guardian masterpiece.
It’s also worth singling out some hard-to-pin-down passages we witness on the new album while following Hansi Kürsch’s singing (e.g. the choruses of Tanelorn (into the void) and A Voice In The Dark). It’s about hitting the highest vocal registers, keeping power, emphasizing the melodic principle, and thereby confirming the singer’s authority and confidence. Given the moments of fragility that Hansi’s voice showed during our recent visits to Blind Guardian gigs, this is an extremely nice and promising discovery.
The album bursts with high dynamics, manifold moods and the already mentioned sonic and stylistic perfection. Let me also highlight the excellent, modern production, which keeps an element of liveliness while carefully arranging the forces of the sound placement into a perfect harmonic balance that makes full use of the available spectrum of the sonic picture. So every single moment of the album is once again extremely convincing in creating the unique Blind Guardian world, one you’ll be able to lose yourself in for a long, long time. The new album is not an easy or musically predictable bite. It takes several listens for the leading motifs to cling to your ears! That’s another remark that guarantees there’s no room for self-repetition this time, the kind we’ve been regularly seeing in recent years from German power metal bands like Primal Fear, Grave Digger, Helloween, Iron Savior, or from Running Wild.
With such concise content and the engraved perfectionism of musical mastery that the new Blind Guardian release offers, we’ve got the first favorite for power metal album of 2010. Yes. Alongside “To The Metal” and “Strings To A Web” by their countrymen Gamma Ray and Rage, this album belongs without a second thought on the short list of the best studio releases that Euro power metal has produced and will produce this year. Don’t sit around with your ears crossed, treat yourself to the best. “At The Edge Of Time” is a new musical diamond from the skilled, well-oiled Blind Guardian creativity, without a single scratch of expression, confirming that ambition remains an inexhaustible source of expressive, idea-driven sparkle for the finest power metal band on European soil!
Lineup
Hansi Kürsch – vocals
Andr̩ Olbrich Рguitar
Marcus Siepen – guitar
Frederik Ehmke – drums
GUESTS:
Prague Philharmonic Orchestra
Adam Klemens – conductor
GUEST MUSICIANS:
Oliver Holzwarth – bass guitar
Mathias Ulmer – keyboards, piano
Eberhard Hahn- flute
Klaus Marquardt – violin
Dirim Ceseroglu – violin
CHOIRS:
Irish Heartbeat
Bach choir Bremerhaven
ADDITIONAL CHOIR VOCALS:
Thomas Hackmann
William “Billy” King
Olof Senkbeil
Jen Majura
Stefan Schmidt
Production
Charlie Bauerfiend & Blind Guardian
Track list
01. Sacred Worlds (9:17)
02. Tanelorn (5:58)
03. Road Of No Release (6:30)
04. Ride Into Obsession (4:46)
05. Curse My Name (5:52)
06. Valkyries (6:38)
07. Control The Divine (5:26)
08. War Of The Thrones (4:55)
09. A Voice In The Dark (5:41)
10. Wheel Of Time (8:55)
