My long love affair with heavy metal is in full rebirth the last few years, as I discover new bands, new sub-genres and new bands. Here’s the second review of a band that has been around a while but is relatively new to me.
Disc 1820 is…Nightfall in Middle Earth
Artist: Blind Guardian
Year of Release: 1998
What’s up with the Cover? A scene from J.R.R. Tolkien’s Ballad of Beren and Luthien. Here we have a depiction of Luthien Tinuviel dancing before the evil Morgoth (who decided to wear his “Galactus” outfit for the event).
I’m not sure why Luthien is depicted as glowing blue; if that happens in the story I don’t remember it. The dancing bit and Luthien being super hot? Yes, that checks out.
Morgoth’s crown has three glowing jewels, which are the Silmarils. If you know what these are, cool. If you don’t, in this story they’re the stakes in a high-stakes wager between Beren and Luthien’s dad, the elven King Thingol. They also serve as the MacGuffin.
If any of this high adventure fantasy talk gets your juices flowing, then the music on this record could be for you. Based on this cover, what gets Morgoth’s juices flowing is Luthien Tinuviel’s dancing but as is often the case, he’s going to feel sleepy after…
How I Came To Know It: A while back I went on a journey seeking music inspired by Lord of the Rings. One of the best outcomes was my discovery of the German band, Blind Guardian. These guys love them some LOTR, and “Nightfall in Middle Earth” is ground zero for that love.
How It Stacks Up: I currently have five Blind Guardian albums, and I’m on the lookout for five more. Of the five I already have, I’m going to put “Nightfall in Middle Earth” in at #1.
Ratings: 3 stars but almost 4
On each listen I appreciated “Nightfall in Middle Earth” a little more, but this record does not make itself easy to love. You have to scrape through a lot of bloat and excess to get to the good stuff at the centre.
“Nightfall in Middle Earth” is Blind Guardian’s love letter to J.R.R.Tolkien, and in particular to his book, “The Silmarillion”. “The Silmarillion” is one of my favourite books of all time (I’ve read it five times and will be reading it again soon) making the subject matter of this album easy to enjoy.
Also easy to enjoy is the exceptional musicianship and song structure on display here. “Nightfall in Middle Earth” is a master class in how to do power metal right. It is symphonic, bombastic, but always with an element of crunch and gravitas that metal needs to be, you know, metal.
Things get off on the right foot early with “Into the Storm,” a song featuring some Grade A guitar work from Andre Olbrich (who also writes all the music for the record). The song’s structure also evokes folk music sensibilities, including some unison singing suitable for long walks with a sword belted on your waist, and maybe later for swinging a tankard of ale at the local tavern.
“Nightfall” and follows with some guitar work that would be just as enjoyable on a mandolin or hurdy-gurdy. Here Blind Guardian go perhaps one step too far into nerd-dom, however. “Into the Storm” is adventuring with your friends in the woods. “Nightfall” is awkwardly riding the city bus in costume on your way to the Ren Fair.
The album also features a healthy dollop of classical music composition as well, with Blind Guardian showing creativity in the arrangements and the penchant for building multiple movements into the longer songs.
Th best of the bunch is “The Curse of Feanor.” It helps that Feanor is one of my favourite characters in the Silmarillion, and hearing someone sing of how ‘fey with wrath’ he is in the first person is delightful fanboy fun. The tune itself shows Olbrich’s compositional talent, and they are some of the stronger lyrics on the record (all written by lead singer Hansi Kursch.
That said, this record has some problems. One is that the lyrics are very uneven. Written for serious fans, the band doesn’t make it easy to follow along if you don’t know the subject matter very well, and even if you do I question some of Kursch’s narrative choices. Olbrich’s music achieves the heroic tone of the book much more consistently than Kursch’s words.
The other challenge with this record is it is seriously bloated. The original recording has 22 individual tracks, and while nine of those are little snippets of music or dialogue each under a minute long, that doesn’t make it better, it makes it worse. The musical interludes do not add to the album’s listening enjoyment, and the dialogue bits are clunky and read like a Dungeons and Dragons session; fun when you’re playing but not something other people want to listen to later.
I’ll always be eternally grateful that Blind Guardian took the time to set one of my dearest literary experiences to music. Despite some clunky moments, the good parts are truly great but despite my pro-Silmarillion bias I could not give this record four stars. If the band had just left all those snippets and short bits on the editing room floor and went with a 12 song (but still 60 minutes long) record, they’d have gotten there.
Best tracks: Into the Storm, The Curse of Feanor, Blood Tears, When Sorrow Sang
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