LEGACY

In Carved in Stone I highly praised the terrific Cliffhanger as one of the best songs by Shadow Gallery. This also goes for the opener on this 4th album, Legacy. Cliffhanger II is at least as good as part I, probably better. Because it's longer and this higher length is used for a mindblowing instrumental part I simply can't get enough of. Unfortunately the album continues with a few tracks that is too much of the same we already heard on Tyranny. They are all good even very good songs but they are 99% copies of Tyranny songs so I can't value these too high. Even the first two albums were more varied and more original than this one even though production quality and composition quality is higher on this Legacy release. The title track is more original than the 3 previous ones but is no more than good/very good. The last track is the epical First Light. On itself a very good epic but where the booklet says it's an epic of 34 minutes in reality it appears to be some 18 minutes (3:30-22:00, just over half that time that is !!).

And it's this rediculous phenomenon of hidden tracks that is reaching the deepest level on this album. And it's about time this behaviour is punished. Because even though Shadow Gallery is one of my favourite bands I can do nothing else than subtract 1 star from my rating for this album. When I bought it I thought I was also buying an epic of way more than half an hour. And this appeared to be phoney. This is extremely disappointing. Shadow Gallery had also done this on Carved Stone with the epical Gostship (1 minute of silence followed by 3 minutes of knocking on a door or something) but goes way to far this time. So instead of 4 I give 3 for Legacy.