The Last Candle

Rhapsody’s newish album, Symphony of Enchanted Lands II: The Dark Secret, featured Christopher Lee of recent fantasy film evil white-haired guy fame for the album’s narration. While I’ve only listened to a couple tracks from the new release — what I have heard sounds like same ole’ Rhapsody: classically powerful, melodically memorable. and bombastically overblown — Lee’s baroque, sonorous voice is a very welcome and audibly-pleasing addition. As an implicit bonus, when Lee came in, the previous narrator, a man who had the voice of a 40-year old simp and sounded like his mother forget his midday pudding, got the boot. Thank Dargor for that. <p/> (To hear a cut from the new album, along with Christopher Lee engaged in some fine narration and funny LARP costuming and lots of stock footage of mountains, Rhapsody’s The Dark Secret page has a music video for one of their singles at the bottom. But also go there to see Christopher Lee looking rather sad on some rather poor album art.) <p/> But while Lee’s admission as narrator was nice, it was only about 50% worth of the Forest of Trolls: Lee is classically trained to sing, including in the opera style. Why Rhapsody of all bands didn’t jump on this opportunity to add yet another facet of classical bombast to their production is beyond me, but there it is. <p/> However, all will be well soon: they’re re-releasing a track from The Dark Secret, and this time a duet between Christopher Lee and Fabio (lead singer of Rhapsody, not that…other guy) will be present. Fabulous. (Check out the previous link; the other band members are playing the surrounding Lee at their respective instruments, looking as equally strange and pretentious as they do when swinging swords around in fields for music videos). <p/> Maybe the addition of Lee will motivate me to buy the albums and the Lee-augmented single, but I dunno. My favorite Rhapsody albums were (most favorably) Dawn of Victory and Power of the Dragonflame where they most successfully combined heavy, rough-ridged melodies with the common 60-piece orchestra and 30 member choir harmonics. The albums before and parts of The Dark Secret are tilted more towards the orchestrated/Manheim Steamroller side of their timbre — still enjoyable, but not tempting enough to rush out and grab. <p/> But speaking of tempting enough to rush out and grab (or, in my case, wait anxiously by the door for the delivery fellow to arrive): Kamelot’s The Black Halo is in my grasp, drive, head and 8/10s of the way to being one of my favorite cuts ever (2/10s for the ultimate test: the test of time). It’s definitely a fine, fine followup to Epica, but The Black Halo has a more mature, detailed sound than the general (but absolutely perfect) melodic brightness of Epica. If Epica was an amazing power metal release with bits of progressive metal creeping in at the sides, The Black Halo has embraced the progressive side fully, meshing the two styles with a hint of black metal (in both feeling and timbre) at the corners.

Heck, the first song on the album, March of Mephisto, is a rough-riffed, minor-keyed, march-sampled anthem featuring Shagrath from black metal group Dimmu Borgir on backup vocals. Compare that to Center of the Universe, Epica’s first song that was bright, upbeat, and wholly optimistic. Geographically, The Black Halo puts its happy-future tune, Serenade, at the end of the album as “the outskirts of the concept” and “an inversion of the opening cut on Epica.” Epica goes light to dark; The Black Halo goes dark to light. Both are fantastic. <p/> Kamelot has released two music videos of songs from the new album on their website. The video for The Haunting (Somewhere In Time) is better than the one for March of Mephisto (although neither is a knock-out), but if you roughly combine the feeling of the two songs — March of Mephisto is just two songs away from The Haunting on the album — the general dark mood of The Black Halo is evident.