INTO THE ELECTRIC CASTLE

Ayreon's third album pulls out all the stops - gathering a small army of guest vocalists, Arjen Lucassen goes for broke, offering up a two-CD rock opera with a plot straight out of cheesy fantasy B-movies: a party of mismatched adventurers from across time and space have been assembled to go on a quest into the Electric Castle because... well, don't lean too hard on the plot otherwise it'll fall over.

It took me a long time to warm to this, largely because whilst Into the Electric Castle is undeniably in the realm of prog metal, in terms of technicality and complexity it's on the lighter side there. The emphasis on this "prog metal rock opera" here is very much on the "opera" part of the blend, and that opera is very much in the realm of a cheesy B-movie.

There are side effects that result from this. Firstly, there just isn't 100 minutes of top-notch music here: there's too many moments where a simple musical motif is stretched out for too long simply to accommodate the cast of vocalists assembled to perform here. This is not the only respect in which the small army of singers cause issues: sure, there's some talented people here, but there's too many of them for the purposes of the narrative, with the result that some of the vocalists don't get many more than a few lines and several characters in the adventuring party are little more than cannon fodder to be killed off or written out of the story bit by bit. (You have a talent like Fish onboard and you kill him off partway through? What are you thinking?)

As a result, it's around this point that Ayreon lose me. Much as I enjoyed their previous projects, from here on their subsequent albums have essentially followed the same basic principles as Into the Electric Castle, and since that formula underwhelms me, so do the Ayreon albums that follow that recipe.