A NIGHT AT THE OPERA

Just take a look at the bloody album cover. You could stare at it for five minutes and still find new ghouls and spooks in the woodwork, grinning back at you. It's an altogether fitting cover for the most challenging, complex and ultimately satisfying power metal album I have ever heard. A Night at the Opera is an album saturated with layers and detail. It's an hour of music forged from the same kind of painstaking perfectionism that Queen poured into its namesake nearly three decades before it. In the broadest sense, it's as if their entire career had led up to this farflung expression of decadent bombast; as it was, there were no greater heights for them to climb thereafter.

Blind Guardian have long been among my favourite metal bands, and A Night at the Opera has been my favourite album of theirs for most of that time. At the same time, I understand why it's turned out to be their most divisive album to date. Everything from Tales from the Twilight World onward were progressively more ambitious undertakings. By the point of Nightfall in Middle-Earth in 1998, Blind Guardian unleashed one of the most overwhelming power metal albums ever; a certified extravaganza of the Tolkien-inspired bombast they're known (and mostly loved) for. At that point, there were already plenty of people complaining-- dammit, they wanted the good, clean power metal of Somewhere Far Beyond again. Even on Nightfall in Middle-Earth, I can understand why some people interpreted the added instrumentation and ambitious conceptual angle as unnecessarily padded.

Of course, Blind Guardian went ahead and made something that has made Nightfall in Middle-Earth look relatively tame in comparison. Even if Blind Guardian were more talented with arrangement than songwriting on this album, the latter seems to get unduly criticized by fans. While I don't imagine songs like "Under the Ice" and "Wait for an Answer" would be as mind-boggling had BG not gone the extra mile, most of these songs would earn a place among the band's best written pieces. Their most epic compositions notwithstanding, "Battlefield" is possibly the best single-worthy addition to the band's catalogue. Complete with the energized Medieval tinge, it successfully conveys the chaotic sense of being in the fray of clashing swords, dark clouds of arrows raining overhead. I have a hard time thinking that even the most prog-hating metal mongoloid would find a gripe with "The Soulforged" either; although it offers some of Andre Olbrich's most intricate guitar work to date, the battleready spirit is palpable.

Part of me almost wishes Blind Guardian had put a greater emphasis on these high-octane tracks; as much as I love the progressive direction they took, the ambition feels all the more profound when they pump it up. Some of the less frantic songs on the album are more difficult to rightly interpret as songs; although each of the tracks have clearcut choruses in the band's prime tradition, I find myself occasionally more in awe of the way the band has brought the music to life, rather than their written skeletons. "Sadly Sings Destiny" and "Wait for the Answer" maintain the feeling of overwhelming exhilaration, but I do wonder if they would have held up, had they been produced with the relatively straightforward approach of Somewhere Far Beyond. Even if it might be said that A Night at the Opera is a slightly less consistent set of songs than a few of the albums before it, it takes an entirely different kind of genius to enrich the music with added arrangements. There's a frustrating trend for symphonic metal bands to tack the 'orchestral' elements of their composition as an afterthought to their supposed main course. Blind Guardian's dedication to see how much detail they could milk out of each minute of the album resulted in an entirely unique listening experience; even the album's weakest moments feel profoundly realized.

Although A Night at the Opera may have still been a prime contender for the best Blind Guardian album without it, there is no doubting a significant part of the awe for the album is derived from it's fourteen-odd minute centrepiece, "And Then There Was Silence". Not only is it the most elaborate piece Blind Guardian ever wrote-- it's quite likely the closest metal has ever come to mirroring the heights of classical music; not just in timbre, but the sheer weight of the composition. It unfolds as a self-contained opera, fuelled with nothing other than the Trojan Wars as their literary inspiration. It took three months' recording (equal to the rest of the album combined) just to buckle the thing down. That balances out to just under five minutes of recorded music per month; for any other working band that would be a snail's pace, but you can hear the countless hours of labour in every minute of their magnum opus. Although the rest of the album could be more or less adapted for use in a live rock concert, the band's performance here could not be removed from its orchestral accompaniment without a fatal loss to the music. Blind Guardian have been long acquainted with the use of symphonic and folkish arrangements in their music, but it's only here that the band turned their instruments into an extension of the symphony, rather than vice versa. Although a defiant motif (I hesitate to call it a chorus!) recurs throughout the piece, "And Then There Was Silence" is virtually rhapsodic as it progresses from one idea to the next. The ebb and flow of the composition is indelibly linked with the source material; although the band have often evoked an operatic impression, it's only here where I can truly imagine the music being adapted for the stage of some grand performance house. It manages to cover an entire range of emotion in less than fifteen minutes, from anxiety to tenderness, from heartbreak to triumph, finality and lingering sense of eternity. To describe it would entail the finest sort of hyperbole. It is power metal raised to 11 in every regard; the amount of substance packed into this album's closing monument to require many hours of listening in its own right.

I think Blind Guardian would have done themselves a disservice, had they tried to surpass the excess of Blind Guardian. They fell ever so slightly over the brink of madness with this one, and the polarized opinions are proof of this. The accessible turn they later took with A Twist in the Myth is confirmation that the band agreed they had finally struck the limits of their sound. To be honest, I don't blame with the people who can't get into the album's demanding excess. It's far from immune (or innocent) from criticism, but many of the things people dislike the most are a proof of the rare extent to which the band pushed their music. To date, I've yet to find another album in power metal that matches it in sheer scope and depth.

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