Performer: Edguy
Label: Nuclear Blast
Release: 2011
Length: 65:34
Rating: 2/5
The ninth studio album from Germany’s Edguy digs deeper into the band’s experiments with a style we’ve sort of remembered since the days of “Mandrake” (2011). If “Rocket Ride” was still a tasteful leveling-out of that experimenting, “Tinitus Sanctus” went right to the edge. “Age Of The Joker” pushes it even further and sails straight past the edge of good taste.
Edguy keep working more and more elements from melodic hard rock into their style, and they overdo it with their self-assured swagger. The riffs are open, simple, trivially built — the moment you hear the start of a guitar phrase, you can call where the song is going. The keyboards are ever more prominent, with synth sounds that draw on the sonic blueprints of eighties pop rock and melodic hard rock. No matter how I turn it over and nitpick, the band still manages to pull something off through all of this. Edguy do keep their recognizable sound, even though it’s not hard to draw plenty of parallels with bands that said everything there was to say long ago and are, of course, influential and inspiring for Edguy.
At the same time, Edguy keep up the pompous bombast that still clings to their sonic and stylistic engraving, while once again “stretching” songs to the familiar running time, which gravitates almost as a rule to well over five and a half minutes (Robin Hood, Behind The Gates Of Midnight World, Rock Of Cashel, Pandora’s Box), or multiplying (already used) ideas (Arcane Of Guild, Faces In The Darkness) , so we end up with 11 tracks of fluctuating quality, and the album leaves behind the feeling of a bland, lukewarm soup that never reached the polish it was aiming for.
What is the band trying to achieve? First and foremost, broad accessibility and pleasing the crowd. These days Edguy are a sort of German version of Sonata Arctica. The popularity of both bands is hard to explain at first glance, and yet. Sugar-glazed Sonata Arctica ride so close to the border with pop that it’s sometimes hard to even count them as metal. Edguy, meanwhile, keep stubbornly softening their sound and style, and the feeling is growing that a quality, renowned Euro power metal band is turning into a band with no trace of a decisive musical direction — one we may fear will end up stuck with the label “joking metal”. “Fake metal”, metal played just for laughs and not for real.
Two Out Of Seven with its sprinkles of perversity in the verses brings a head-on tangle with the sound of synthesizers used by eighties pop hits, and sonically and production-wise it just doesn’t fit with the guitar riff. It’s a textbook example of how Edguy degrade themselves here. The song is Edguy-esque in every respect, but the feeling it leaves behind is downright pathetic, because the crew behind it is capable of so much better. The fact that the album is lazy and plods along dully, “thanks” to mostly mid-tempo songs, is of course not washed away by the less interesting balladesque Every Night Without You, which stays clichéd and boring. In songs like Breathe (minus the idiotic synth sound in the verse) and Fire On The Downline, the band does manage to squeeze out of the lead chorus melodies the qualities that adorn Edguy’s older work. Sadly, this time such moments are shown in a sizable minority on the album.
The instrumental parts are drawn out, and often slow a song to a complete crawl and deaden it, as in Rock Of Cahsel, where Edguy weave in folk elements, utterly clichéd solutions in the melody of the motifs, which ignite with elementary conviction in an acoustic dress and in the hands of British/Irish bands that are tied to these approaches at their core . Of course Edguy try to cunningly hide this juicy pile of shit once again in the shiny cloak of clowning around, which (at times downright forced) has more or less been obligatory for the band ever since the “Mandrake” album. “Didn’t get the joke? No panic, dude, we’re just kidding around a bit!” That probably keeps working indefinitely only on the deaf. And Pandora’s Box with its middling “delta blues” experiment? No problem. The band is simply open to lame jokes. If you didn’t get it, there’s something wrong with you, not with Edguy. The truth lies elsewhere. With Pandora’s Box, the tracklist picked up another hard-to-digest song, one that’s dynamically totally clogged because of experimenting with material that doesn’t suit the band at all and that the band, in its spirit, in its basic essence and with its heart, was never devoted to. If the album were a concept album, these experiments would make more sense.
“Age Of The Joker” is an album that doesn’t move anywhere. Sammet’s vocals have thinned out, his voice has also dropped over the years, and in the high lines you can feel him dragging the verses out with pain from the depths of his lungs. This thin vocal color doesn’t suit mid-tempo songs at all, because with the instrumentally trivial setup, they don’t bring in the right melodic filling, even though Sammet’s voice is basically geared toward exactly that kind of approach. For songs like these you need a stronger, thicker voice, like the ones belonging to Jorn Lande, Johnny Gioeli or Rusell Allen. The best thing for Sammet would be for Edguy to flirt with Euro power metal elements again as soon as possible and tune down half a step.
“Age Of The Joker” is not a fun album, nor is it a special album, nor is it a new developmental step forward in terms of the band’s artistic growth. It’s buying the crowd’s affection under the pretext of clowning around, from a band that’s creatively played out and burned out, and that clearly hit its creative peak back in 2001. The product is strictly meant for the band’s die-hard fans, who believe in their darlings as the embodiment of a deity that is infallible in its actions. Sammet, who writes all the music and lyrics himself, is certainly a miracle worker, but this time he failed to cash in on his talent. All that’s left is a thought that will help you forget this album, and a rhetorical question: “When’s the next Avantasia album coming out?”
Line-up
Tobias Sammet – vocals
Jens Ludwig – guitar, dobro
Dirk Sauer – guitar
Tobias “Eggi” Exxel – bass guitar
Felix Bohnke – drums
GUEST MUSICIAN:
Eddy Wrapiprou – keyboards
Production
Sascha Paeth
Track list
1. Robin Hood (8:24)
2. Nobody’s Hero (4:31)
3. Rock of Cashel (6:18)
4. Pandora’s Box (6:45)
5. Breathe (5:03)
6. Two Out of Seven (4:27)
7. Faces in the Darkness (5:22)
8. The Arcane Guild (4:58)
9. Fire on the Downline (5:47)
10. Behind the Gates to Midnight World (8:56)
11.Every Night Without You(4:52)
