THE FOURTH LEGACY

On Fourth Legacy Kamelot finally enters the major prog metal league with honors. Everything their earlier album, Siégue Periculous, hinted are here in full bloom. Thanks a lot to the right production by Sasha Paeth (Heaven´s Gate) and Miro. The duo really knows how to bring Kamelot´s sound to a new level. The band now has mature in terms of playing and writing. Although losing their keyboards player services - and since then officially remaining a quartet - the band included a myriad of guests to enhance their sound and explore new territories.

Fourth Legacy is progressive power metal at its best, adding many elements to he basic trio of guitar-bass-drums. Besides keyboards and orchestrations, there are some female vocals, eastern instruments and so on. the songs are varied and mature. Roy Kahn´s voice finally gets the fitting recording and soars through the whole album. He has one of the most beautiful voices in metal, prefering to sing at lower registers to bring more deph to the melodic tunes. It works wonders on the most up temp tunes like the title track as well as in the totally acoustic cut A Sailorman´s Hymn (Thomas Youngblood shows his skills with the acoustic classical guitar too). The lyrics are quite intelligent and also varied, escaping easily of most metal´s or prog´s trappings of commonplace.

Although the band would evolve to even more symphonic sounds in the future (Epica, The Black Halo) and would deliver a greater power metal album (Karma), Fourth Legacy is still a remarkable CD, the first to truly bring up the enourmous potential the band always had, specially since Roy Khan´s addition. Highly recommended.