A NIGHT AT THE OPERA

All bands have their golden phases and release some pretty awesome albums (or album) during it. That is the time when the bands make their classics, their most important and/or representative works, when they truly make their ground for the future, for being remembered and having some influence whatsoever. With Blind Guardian, that phase started with Imaginations From the Other Side and will (hopefully) continue pass A Twist in the Myth, and includes this very album that i am reviewing right now.

With A Night at the Opera, Blind Guardian does exactly what the album name proposes: with an enormous amount of vocal overdubs and most songs having an epic feeling, it does seems like, in some extend, you are in an opera house or in a concert hall.

Also, A Night at the Opera do not sound like the normal Blind Guardian album, but in the good way: the already good straightforward power metal they did was, here, partially thrown away and substituted by an interesting, diverse and fresh metal. So, instead of just exceeding themselves at the straightforward power metal (like they did in Nightfall in Middle-Earth and Imaginations from the Other Side), they actually brought many new things to the table, like the more profuse usage of keyboards and pianos (for being both the harmonic base or another soloist instrument) and the bigger versatility of the instrumental session. Their music became clearly much deeper and interesting, apart from also becoming more complex, and maybe that is why this album could arguably be classified as a progressive metal album.

This album, however, carries with itself one very sad fact: this is the last Blind Guardian studio album with the long-time drummer Thomen. Thomen actually left Blind Guardian in 2005, claiming that he was not satisfied by the direction the band took in Nightfall and A Night and to pursuit his own personal projects, after being the drummer of Blind Guardian for 20 years.

The highlights go to the whole album. All songs are very good ones and the only one that really need any extra attention is the only band epic up to date, called And Then There was Silence, (possibly) based on the Trojan War (like you didn't had it coming . . .).

Grade and Final Thoughts

I gotta say that i really believe that this album is actually as good as Nightfall in Middle-Earth. When it comes to the best Blind Guardian album, people always choose one between this one, Nightfall or Imaginations (which i believe is the less-good of the three), but i think that both night albums are just as good, but good in different ways.

Anyway, the bottom line is that this album is really awesome (specially in the power metal sense of the word, because all songs have an epic feeling). Because of that i think that this albums deserves the masterpiece grade.

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