(Rated this album with 8 out of 10) Reviewed by
Paul Brutscher Brutscher
from Little Falls, MN United States
At first I thought this album was a five-star, easy. It is simply stuffed with good things-good song writing for the most part, CRAZY talented musicians, but was the overbearing chamber orchestra in the background and constant choral vocals really neccessary? Long ago, Blind Guardian started out as just another german thrash metal band, with slightly better song writing than its peers and a lot of influence from science fiction other escapist literature. They built up, improving musically, definitively breaking from thrash metal with the album Imaginations from the Other Side. With Nightfall in Middle Earth, Blind Guardian achieved a class by themselves-everything was in place, the stars were aligned, the subject matter was perfect. A Night at the Opera is an example of a band crashing from its own inertia. Again, the only people who genuinely HATED this album weren't genre fans. They expanded their subject matter into philosophy(The Age of False Innocence, about the emergence of Neitzchean thinking) twentieth century history (Wait for an Answer, which lamented the tragedy of the rise of the Third Reich in Germany) even venturing into religious themes with the opening track, Precious Jerusalem. But the production is simply too much. I liked the songs, hated the production. I would love to hear these tracks stripped down and remixed without so much extra noise. As it stands, Night at the Opera is a flawed heavy metal masterpiece.
