?Classics? of power metal #6: AVANTASIA - The Metal Opera (2001), upon further review

Picking up the twin questions of whether The Metal Opera succeeds as a power metal record and as a concept album.  I'm a bit surprised to find that its success with the former is part of the reason I'm more mixed on the latter.

So, the songs here are generally good.  A bunch of catchy metal songs is what you need first and foremost to make a top-tier power metal record.  They nailed that part.  One aspect of Tobias's songwriting that I think needs proper mention is the transition game.  If you're going to play with anything resembling a complex song structure, the pieces need to fit together.  Not only does that happen here, but it's often the source of the hooks.  [Chant, instruments drop out] -> "What is going ooooooon?!" -> [drumroll] -> "Reach out for the light... [chugchugchug]."  Together, that adds up to a hook.  There's an innate understanding here of how one piece of a song should set up another.  End what sounds like it should be the chorus of "Serpents In Paradise" by going another step higher - "for the cross" - then a few measures of drums to punctuate it, then one long note that's a step up from the chorus but one more step up would be an octave above the verse, making it feel incredibly natural to drop back into the latter.  I'm going to stop listing examples; the point is, high level composition everywhere, as epitomized by the links between sections.  My ears especially adore the interplay between solo and chorus on "Breaking Away" and the way verse, pre-chorus, and chorus build on each other in the title track; that is above and beyond both songs' choruses just being incredibly hooky things full of words.*  One of the best things I can say about "The Tower" is that it's a ten-minute song that doesn't feel nearly that long; a very unified composition (take the early introduction of the "halleluyah" chants to set up the way a similar chant will be the basis for the bridge). 

Obviously nobody's going to be faulting the musicianship here either.  In particular I'm a big fan of Alex's drum fills.  "Reach Out For The Light," "Farewell," and "The Glory Of Rome," are all good opportunities to hear him decide exactly how many notes can comfortably fit into a gap at the end of a phrase.

So, it's important to acknowledge that any complaints I might have can be readily blunted by switching one's brain over to the hook-loving "we are the power inside!  We bring you fantasy!" channel.

In my initial writeup you'll note a bit of expectation of something a little different in terms of variety.  I guess I imagined a "metal opera" having a bunch of distinct performers and just general more theatricality.  Instead, most of the drama is carried by Tobias.  He's a versatile vocalist, meaning many change-ups in vocal delivery both between songs and from part to part of the song.  Good!  However, this also renders bringing in numerous guests into less of a big deal than one might think, since they don't really broaden the musical palate.  In particular Tobias's character spends a lot of time doing duo acts with Michael Kiske's character, and the two singers have basically the same vocal range and patterns.  And Tobias often does the thing where he'll sing a verse echoing a different character's words from a previous verse.  Oh yeah, there are group singalong choruses though, which sometimes actually represent multiple characters but sometimes don't (or something that's somehow neither of those options, like "Gabriel and the voices in his head").  Honestly, for damn near every song, without the lyrics in front of me it'd be hard-to-impossible to figure out which parts belong to which character.**  It really is Tobias's show.  On the whole this is fine, since he's a good singer, but that took some getting used to for someone expecting a different sort of collaboration.  David DeFeis and Sharon den Adel are the two vocalists who do something the most different from Tobias, yet they get absolutely buried in the proceedings.  Both "Jakob" and "Anna" are characters who get talked about in great volume despite having few lines and basically no real active role in the story.***

I do wish sonic variety in general were... I mean it is there, and I'm not trying to say that it's not there, but I wish it were incorporated a little more throughout tracks, or stood out more.  The monk-style chants so prominent in the first few songs mostly go away until the end, which would've been a main obvious way to spice things up.  The flute-like sound that frames "Farewell" could have been incorporated into the song more thoroughly instead of just being the intro/bridge before quickly dropping into standard metal instrumentation.  A storytelling-focused record could always use more piano; there's piano, but I kinda want more.

Of course when the record does give us a full on change of pace, I have to be a contrarian who's of mixed minds about that too - and here I refer to what I'm going to have to pick as my least favorite non-interlude track, "Inside."  Going all piano and giving it a heavily theatrical air certainly makes it stand out, as it should in theory as the first track set in a fantasy world (the first to feature an elf and dwarf, etc).  "Inside" should be an off kilter departure sonically.  However, not entirely sure that I like the way that sounds, plain and simple.  Having listened to forty-ish minutes of Avantasia that doesn't have that particular kind of melodrama, I'm not really ready for something so cabaret.  I guess my point again is that I wish the non-metal sounds were mixed into the songs with the same level of smoothness that the different metal sounds are mixed with each other.

So, what is it exactly that I'm asking for from Avantasia if the killer choruses and the ornamentation of a power metal core with some bells and whistles doesn't lead to my complete satisfaction?  I'd like to direct you to a little record called The Metal Opera, Pt II.  Okay, so I haven't 100% assimilated Pt II, but my thoughts at this point are that unlike its predecessor, it commits completely to the stage show vibe.  Tobias is fluidly shifting back and forth between singing for Helloween and singing like Meat Loaf, singers like Oliver Hartmann are providing a more obvious contrast between characters, keyboards are all over the place creating soundscapes and piano-driven sections alike.  Henjo is always ready with a blazing solo in case you're tempted to forget that it's a metal record... not that there's any risk of that on an album that features Avantasia going almost thrash on "The Final Sacrifice."  It's as if part two was composed to address the failings of part one.  Except that my understanding is that Tobias basically wrote the whole thing together in 1999-ish before recording any of it.  So I don't know if it was a stylistic choice to divide it this way or if he got more confident as he went along.  All I know is that sonically speaking, The Metal Opera Pt II has basically the elements that'd be needed to make the original next-level genius... whilst the second half of that second record doesn't seem to have the same caliber of hooks and level of edge that The Metal Opera lands more consistently.  Still, we're tantalizingly close to something transcendent here.  Pt II is narratively more cohesive too, frequently using the same phrases to mean different things; for reasons not interesting enough to relegate to more than an asterisked footnote, I think Pt II makes me appreciate the whole plot, such that it is, way more than The Metal Opera alone could have.****

A few more bits of snark for the road:

) Michael is credited as "Ernie" in the original liner notes.  Internetting has led me to believe that getting him on The Metal Opera was a bit of a coup.  In my time of paying attention to metal, I've been vaguely aware that Michael was a guy who'd have his own things going but also would pop up on, like, Gamma Ray records and such.  In 2001, I gather that new Kiske-predominant power metal was more of a rare breed.  Tobias must have gotten some pleasure just from the whole premise of "casting" Michael as his character's mentor, given how much of a Helloween fan he clearly is.

) One effective way to make lyrics go from obscure to completely incomprehensible is to sing a different set of words over top of a song's final chorus.  I think Tobias must be trying to troll us on some level.

) Supposedly, the everyman main character has the surname "Laymann," and the girl he's trying to free has the last name "Held."  Yeesh.  I guess I should be glad it's not even more on the nose.  (I mean, they could have included a feared ruler caled "Lord Nefaryus" and a naive idealist called "Faythe," so, small favors.)

 

) So, in the last post I mentioned that a few years ago I might have heard, and not thought much of, an Avantasia record, but I couldn't remember for sure.  Well, I think there's a decent chance that it was A Paranormal Evening With The Moonflower Society.  Either that, or I'm thinking of Theater Of Sorcery by Avaland.  It was one or the other.

 

Favorite track:  "Avantasia"

Runner up:  "Breaking Away"

Least favorite track (non-interlude):  "Inside"

Rating:  4/5

Will I come back to Avantasia?

Yes!  Will probably run the whole discography.  For the none who care about my listening plans, I've read three different posts/webpages independently leading me to believe that I might really appreciate aspects of The Scarecrow, so will check that one out soon.  From there, I'll decide whether I expect to have enough to say about Avantasia to write more about them (like I'm considering doing with Manilla Road) or whether I should just quietly go through their catalogue in the background without blogging about it (like I'm currently doing with Running Wild).

 

I might have to mentally prepare a little more before voluntarily listening to a band called "Edguy," though.  Gotta have standards.

Things I learned about power metal:

- I should be less dismissive of metal's attempt to tell fantasy epics.  The ambition can make a project more than the some of its parts, whilst the level of writing can be quite sophisticated as well as being childish, sometimes within the same song. 

- Group projects subsumed by a single author's voice tend to mostly just reflect the author.

Next:  Early impressions of Falconer's Falconer, whenever I get around to it!

* As already noted in the second Glory To The Brave post, I've become a big believer in extended phrases/sentences and generally lots of words per chord being the key to a power metal chorus.

 

** I didn't want to go back and edit my initial impressions, but yes, there are multiple occasions in which I didn't know who was singing what, or flat out got it wrong in that post.  Most often it came from mistaking Tobias doing his best classic Kiske-isms for Michael himself.  

***Jakob is set up as a classic secondary protagonist trope.  He'd seem to be in ideal position to play victim-villain, the one who chooses the wrong team and then has to recognize what he's done.  But if any of that actually happens, it's all off screen.

****Having heard the whole thing, I can say three things: one, it's bascially a one-man show about Tobias's character deciding which of the voices in his head to trust or not; make whatever metaphors out of that you want.  Two, there's a certain panache in making the very concept of fantasy the Macguffin that the heroes are seeking and the villains are suppressing.  Three, if I didn't already know that like all concept albums, the plot is kind of a confused mess, I'm sure Vandroiy's hilariously anticlimactic off-screen death would have sealed the deal.