BLIND GUARDIAN - Somewhere Far Beyond (1992), early impressions

As previously planned, since I'm going to be writing about Imaginations From The Other Side, I feel like both giving it some context and finally dipping deeper into the Blind Guardian waters.  Hence, before I do the usual track-by-track dissection of Imaginations, I'm listening to, and writing about, its predecessor, album #4. 

 

I've perhaps been drifting away from the original premise of these "early impressions" posts, which was to sort of mimic the effect of an online "reaction video" in giving just a sense of my pure reactions to hearing something new.  So, I listened to the record twice, and I'm not listening to it again until after I write and post something.  Might not even edit it much.  Let's do this.

 

I have three main first impressions of Somewhere Far Beyond, most of which are positive.  Let's start with what it sounds like.  Somewhere is where Helloween and company had (as of the early '90s, I mean) taken power metal, plus a little extra in two equal directions - edge and whimsy.  The sound is thoroughly of its era with fairly solid production, so you've got the two guitarists (plus guests) riffing and soloing away fast, Hansi Kürsch's vocals being front and center as he belts it out whilst his bass is mostly inaudible, and drummer Thomen Stauch supplying a steady barrage of Helloween-like machine gun drumming while making room for plenty of big rolling fills.  A few times Hansi sounds like an '80s rocker, because it's coming from that style.  But despite being a good old-fashioned metal record with a European man screaming about fantasy novels, I'm not inclined to apply the epithet "cheesy" because the music rocks so hard.  The tones of the riffs are deep and the singer has grit.  It's a meaner overall sound than you get from even early Helloween or Running Wild, more up to the level of intensity of the speed/thrash world that was at the time still so closely adjacent to power metal.  That's offset with a higher incorporation of the crooning and acoustic passages, the so-called folk influences.  I'd hesitate to call what BG do a "core" of folk in any meaningful way - this isn't Angra here, after all - so much as a nice dollop of added flavor.  Same thing for the group vocals, provided by a mix of Hansi multi-tracking and other voices.  As far as the records I've written about this actually pairs well with A Sultan's Ransom in certain ways.  If Cloven Hoof were seeing how interesting sounding a record they could make while sticking almost entirely to the usual toolkit, Somewhere is an attempt to make a sonically interesting record by adding bells and whistles in exactly the proportions needed not to overwhelm its speed/power core.

 

Second main impression is that the performances are very much "there."  As usual I'll focus on the vocals.  Hansi I of course knew objectively to be a versatile singer, but here he stays in each of his lanes long enough to really show it off.  Where metal singers usually are undeniably better suited for specific ranges or styles of songs, Hansi honestly sounds equally at home in lyrical barding mode and in gravel-voiced intensity mode, as well as everything in between.  He can pretty much do whatever the record calls for, including back-and-forthing with himself like on "Ashes To Ashes."*  I'm definitely hearing the Dio comparisons in that here's another singer who commits to the bit of singing about elves or whatever, and has enough resonance in all pitches to keep from ever coming off as wimpy or thin-voiced.  I've never loved Hansi's voice in the past; here I'm in the state of some combination of being forced to respect the objective quality mixed with some level of actually enjoying what he's doing.

 

Third main impression is cohesion - among the band members, in the songwriting, etc.  This is probably the biggest reason why, at least at this early stage Somewhere is working much better for me than I've ever gotten from dabbling in Imaginations From The Other Side, my only other real exposure to this band so far.  There's a tightness here to the way Hansi and André Olbrich** construct these songs, down to the perfectly placed opportunities for guitar riffs to playfully weave amongst the vocals - "Journey Through The Dark" and "The Quest For Tanelorn" are good examples.  I felt like where I complain about Imaginations the issue is that there are many cool parts all coming fast and furious and chaotic; Somewhere never loses sight of where a song is going, so the extra flourishes I talked about above just make the songs bigger rather than detracting.  I'm open to the possibility that something more accessible and familiar is simply an easier sell whereas I need more time with something more challenging... but also kinda dismissive, since a good song is a good song, and Somewhere is providing me plenty of good metal.  Seems a shame that the band would drift away from this solid foundation, but I don't know that I'm necessarily married to '80-inspired speed metal as a style so much as I'm married to coherent songs that clearly take the listener from point A to point B.***

 

 

Other thoughts: 

- Insider info for those few who actually read this part:  Although I'm not 100% sure, my tentative plan if Imaginations "won" my little straw poll has always been to do a bit of a trilogy of records, including both Somewhere and the band's sixth release, Nightfall In Middle-Earth, AKA the "other" one that always makes it to every list of essential German power metal releases.

 

- Highlights and lowlights varied quite a bit between listens #1 and #2 for some reason.  I was into "Time What Is Time" right off but found "Journey Through The Dark" nondescript; on second listen, it was the opposite, with the latter track seeming much more worth my attention.  On first listen the two "Bard's Song"s both jumped out as two immediate lowlights, on the grounds that non-metal ersatz folk doesn't play to the vocalist's or the band's strengths... and that neither does full-on histrionic shrieking at the expense of structure.  On second listen, honestly, they're not that far removed from the rest of the record, and both songs seem pretty okay.   "The Quest For Tanelorn" seemed like a highlight both times through, though; no surprise given that it features about as close to an accessible pop chorus as we're likely gonna get from this band, it seems.

 

- I'm still wondering whether, in their early years, Iced Earth were ever thought of as BG disciples or clones, especially given that Jon S. and Hansi toured together and worked together almost from the beginning.  Google's auto-text tells me that there was never really that accusation.  I dunno, I hear a lot of similarity in the construction of riffs and atmospherics, and I am not convinced that as of the early '90s that the gulf between having distinctly "USPM" vs. "EUPM" influences was nearly wide enough yet to be immediately obvious to a listener.

 

Favorite track:  "The Quest For Tanelorn"

Runner up:  "Journey Through The Dark"

Least favorite track:  "The Bard's Song - In The Forest"

Preliminary rating:  4/5

Coming up:  More on Somewhere Far Beyond, whenever I get around to it!

*When I wrote about At The Expense Of Humanity by Judicator, an act often considered to have a big Blind Guardian influence, one of my favorite tricks of theirs was the frequent use of this exact sort of paired contrasting phrases as though coming from two different voices.

 

**Pretty much every song is a Kürsch/Olbrich writing credit.  I think that's basically modus operandi for BG.

***Yes, yes, the Angras of the world can stay coherent despite all sorts of side trips.  Once again, this isn't Angra here.****  

****Especially since, as of 1992, Angra hadn't released anything yet.