Now this is a band that received a lot of hype in the metal community. The reason for this is simple - it's a supergroup. It features the guitar stylings of Iced Earth's Jon Schaffer and the superb mellifluous singing of Blind Guardian's Hansi Kürsch, backed by a couple of studio musicians on lead guitar and drums (Jim Morris and Mark Prator respectively). And, of course, as a huge fan of both Iced Earth and Blind Guardian, I had been awaiting this album for several months with rabid anticipation. I was practically drooling when I opened up the CD, which I imported from Europe, and placed it in my CD-ROM drive.

After biting my nails through the ominous intro "Rites of Passage," I was very pleased with the barrage of triplet-oriented riffs that came through my speakers for the first few moments of "Heaven Denies" - very solid thrash rhythm with a simplistic but effective lead texture running over it.

Then the vocals kicked in, and I was suddenly in paradise. Hansi Kürsch is the most talented vocalist in metal today. I can't say enough about how thoroughly breathtaking his voice sounds on this album. The style he uses is the same as that on Blind Guardian's Nightfall in Middle-Earth, but without all the annoyingly overdone and bombastic "layered" choruses. This is all Hansi, with no backing vocalists whatsoever (except for the occasional whispers from Schaffer on a couple of tracks).

In all honesty, the vocals are really the most exciting thing about this album. After listening to it several times through, I realized that there isn't a single riff through the entire 52½-minute opus that hasn't appeared before on an Iced Earth album. It sounds like Schaffer has truly run out of ideas for riffs.

However, nobody ever said that an album has to have any unique riffs to be enjoyable, and such is definitely the case with this album. Many of the songs are structured in such a way that they take a while to get into, but are very satisfying after the initial period of immersion. The catchiness is definitely there, but it's present in a form more similar to that of the first three Iced Earth albums than the two most recent ones.

However, there is a certain feeling of disappointment that goes with this album. Both Iced Earth and Blind Guardian are known for their grandiose and epic songwriting, which is conspicuously absent from this album. Sure, there are songs like "Fiddler on the Green" and "The Whistler," which are (dumb song titles aside) very dark and emotional and perfectly structured. But most of the songs (even the conceptual trilogy at the end - the storyline of which is still somewhat hazy to me) don't really go above and beyond most power metal in terms of encompassing the listener in the mood and atmosphere of the stories they relate. More would be expected from the minds that manifest this project.

Putting all expectations aside, it would've been much easier to swallow this album, since the whole here is truly greater than the sum of its parts. However, after a while, there is simply nothing that motivates me anymore to yank this album from my rack and spin it once or twice. This is one of those projects that will never get past the "couldashouldawoulda" stage in my mind.

This review is credited to:
The Havoc Vulture