A TWIST IN THE MYTH

Once you know Blind Guardian's music, you will enjoy this album!

For me personally, I really enjoy the music of Blind Guardian, including this "A Twist In The Myth" which is even though less powerful than the band's best album (my view) "Nightfall in Middle Earth". I know the music of Blind Guardian is more on power metal than progressive metal but I do like how the Hansi Kursch sings especially when there is choir companion. In a way it reminds me to Gentle Giant, tken to the other extreme of power. The choirs also somewhat remind me to Uriah Heep. Secondly the music that accompanies vocal line sounds very dynamics with notes and chords that follow the melody line led by the vocal.

"This Will Never End" (5:07) opens the album with power metal scene dominated by guitar riffs. Compared to Nightfall, this track's melody is not that catchy. However the music flow makes the album interesting to enjoy. The rhythm section tends to be formed by combining guitar melody, choir and bass. It flows to the next track with similar style "Otherland" (5:14). I like "Turn the Page" (4:16) because it has good balance of rhythm section and guitar solo with unique sound. The uniqueness of guitar sound is one of the factors that I love the music of Blind Guardian. It reminds me to the unique sound of Uriah Heep's Mick Box. The music flows nicely to "Fly" (5:43) which starts with drum beats at the intro part. I also like how this track flows and provides great vocal line by Kursch. "Carry the Blessed Home" (4:03) brings the music down with mellow style. AGain, through this track Blind Guardian demonstrates the power of their vocal line and choirs.

"Straight Through the Mirror (5:48)" is a good track with symphonic style, moves dynamically in power metal vein. Again, this track indicates the unique sound of Blind Guardian. It is then followed beautifully with "Lionheart" (4:15) with its powerful riffs. It's a good track, really! "Skalds and Shadows" (3:13) brings the tone down with great acoustic guitar fills accompanying nice vocal line. It reminds me to the music of Nightfall. The continuing "The Edge" (4:27) is also a good track.

Overall, I do enjoy this album and in fact it's a very good one. For some people who don't get used to Blind Guardian's music, this might be not an enjoyable album. I do suggest you to start with "Nightfall in Middle Earth" album which I think it's a masterpiece album. AS far as this album, it has good composition, musicianship and production. This album lacks in melody if it's compared with "Nightfall in Middle Earth" album. My CD is a deluxe edition with Disc 2. It's a precious collection for me. Overall rating is 3.5 stars. Keep on proggin' ..!

Peace on earth and mercy mild - GW

I was dissapointed the first time I listened to A Twist in the Myth, as I had loved Blind Guardian´s previous album A Night at the Opera and didn´t feel A Twist in the Myth is as good as that one. My biggest problem though is that I feel this is their weakest album out of their last four, and I was hoping this would be a continuation of the bombastic symphonic sound they used on A Night at the Opera.

As it turns out A Twist in the Myth is a more stripped down affair than A Night in the Opera ( as stripped down as a Blind Guardian album can be). The part that I like the least though is the fact that Blind Guardian has used more Hard Rock tendencies on A Twist in the Myth. This is in my eyes not suiting for a metal band. A song like This Will Never End does save a lot though as it is a brilliant song. Other songs on the album have great ideas too, but I think they lack the enthusiasm that was very much present on previous albums.

Bottomline is this is not what I expected from Blind Guardian, and I can only give 3 stars for A Twist in the Myth. It´s a good and solid album, just not outstanding when bearing in mind what Blind Guardian has released in the past.

As I understand it, Blind Guardian decided they'd had enough creating bombastic songs that they couldn't pull off live that well, so they stripped down their sound some and came out with an album that doesn't sound that much like power metal OR progressive metal. This one falls somewhere in the hard rock or heavy metal area, as far as I know. While that's not bad, and the album is certainly a fun one to listen to, it seems quite a letdown after the massive and unstoppable A Night at the Opera. There are few choirs here, the tempos are generally slower, the guitars less crunchy, the melodies a bit less inspiring, and the strings and backing sounds are mostly missing. It is quite well produced, however, especially compared to any of the pre-Nightfall in Middle Earth albums.

A worthy addition to a Blind Guardian fan's collection, but not a good place to start, and not really that essential. The track Otherland is about the only song that really harks back to the excitement I found on other CDs of their, but they all are listenable and, I suppose, progressively mellow.

The last album Of Blind Guardian from 2006 entitled A twist in the myth is a returning to the roots In my opinion, here they create the same atmosphere as on their first 3-4 albums. Is more towars speed/power then a prog metal album. Oliver Holzwath from Sieges Even fame is again invited to make some bass lines, again good. Not a piece stands as favourite from me, all has the same characteristics, not bad but not special either. I prefer the Nightfall in middle earth or the first album, their best , this one is concentrate more on power and speedy instrumentation, not bad of course but without any magical moments from the previous albums. Not much to add, and not much to discuss about this album, is only good. Anyway the band is still on the baricades creating good music after more than 20 yeras in metal field.3 stars for this album

Just not quite there

Blind Guardian is one of my favorite power metal bands. I own every studio album they have put out and also own many other things from the band, but if there is one thing that could have lived without is this album right here.

With the exit of Thomen "The Omen" Stauch and the subsequent replacement, the band seems to have lost something. The music appears to be pretty close from what they have done so far and fits confortably in their new own style of power metal and the songs aren't bad. This is still Blind Blind Guardian for sure, but you can still feel that something is missing, what is only natural after the departure of a member of a band that, up untill then, had the exact same line-up for 20 years, even though the creative core of the band are Hasi and André.

There is, however, other explanation for why this album is such a let down. It seems that, after putting out such epic songs and albums, the band just wanted to go back to writing simpler and more direct songs instead. OK, fair enough. They have already done that in the past with above the average results in albums like Battalions of Fear and Tales from the Twilight World. A Twist in the Myth, however, falls short of one thing both those albums had: varierty. In far too many places A Twist in the Myth just seems too generic for its own good and that obviously affects negatively.

You have the epic songs, the mild and cute ballad (which has been a rule in their every album since Somewhere Far Beyond), a bunch of other songs that i just can't see why are in this album. Despite that, Blind Guardian is still able to deliver some gold here and there, either as a part of a forgetable song or as an actual good song. The songs that fall in the category of the latter are This Will Never End, Otherland, Turn The Page and Straight Through The Mirror, to some extent (maybe I'm being too soft with the last one, but still it still has its moments). Past the third song the album gets increasingly tiresome and I find somehow hard to reach the final song, in spite of the fact that this is one of my favorite bands.

Grade and Final Thoughts

I guess that every band or artist will eventually release something that is sub-par to the rest of his or her work and this is Blind Guardian's. If you want great simpler songs by them, just go after their 80's and early 90's albums.

'A Twist in the Myth' - Blind Guardian (79/100)

Whenever a press kit describes a band 'stripping down' their sound or, worse still, 'returning to their roots' on a new album, a part of me wants to hurl. The other part of me has been trained, time and again, to dismiss this claim as a euphemism for the stage in a band's career where they admit they've gone as far as they can go with their ambitions with the album prior. Metallica's infamously accessible Black Album is the first example that comes to mind; I'm sure you can think of many more.

Well, leave it to a band as consistently stunning as Blind Guardian to demonstrate how streamlining a sound can still result in freshly exciting material. Their seventh LP A Night at the Opera still stands as the most ornate, ambitious and ridiculously complex power metal album I have ever heard. Blind Guardian did everything they could to saturate each moment of the album with as much arrangement and detail as possible, and as far as I'm concerned, the effort paid off magnificently. As much as I think A Night at the Opera to be their magnum opus, there wasn't room for surpassing nor repeating it. Think of A Twist in the Myth as Blind Guardian's very own Going for the One; after pushing themselves as far as they could go, they managed to successfully reel themselves back in, all the while covering new territory as they went along. This is Blind Guardian at their most catchy and song-based, and the rare restraint they pulled off here resulted in some powerfully written and delivered material.

It really does make me wonder why A Twist in the Myth tends to get overlooked in favour of its more ambitious neighbours. It was the first album in their history that dared to diverge from the upward trajectory their career had taken for over two decades. It may have been a forced moved considering how exhausted the band must have been after pushing their limits so hard, but it was a risk nonetheless. Especially for a band like Blind Guardian, it seems unlikely the album turned out as well as it did; given that many of their past (and future) albums emphasized the awe of the arrangements, it's easy to forget that they're strong songwriters at heart. "Another Stranger Me" and "Lionheart" are two of the most contagious songs the band have ever penned in their time, and there are several other cuts off the album that could deserve being mentioned in the same sentence. Is it possible not to be swept away by the jovial optimism of "Turn the Page", or the melancholic sophistication of "Fly". Clearly it is possible judging from the opinions some others have expressed towards the album, but to my ears the album's catchiness is pretty irresistible, and cannot be found on anything else the band put out.

Blind Guardian weren't particularly progressive with this album, nor does the style here much resemble true power metal. Genre purists would probably say A Twist in the Myth is generally too slow and rock- oriented to warrant association with power metal. Regardless, it sounds completely like Blind Guardian. It's almost as if they stripped themselves of the pretences of power metal, and instead focused on writing songs regardless of genre. Although detractors and impartial arbiters alike would find common ground in describing A Twist in the Myth as Blind Guardian focusing on the fundaments of verse-and-chorus, these guys have always rocked at writing fantastic choruses. The two singles notwithstanding, "Otherland", "Straight Through the Mirror" and "Lionheart" all stand out for infectious, larger- than-life choruses. It should go without saying that these moments come with the band's signature choral harmonies. Hansi Kürsch gets a larger portion of the focus this time around, and leads the band confidently through each track. His greatest moment here is quite possibly the album's mandatory acoustic offering "Skalds and Shadows", which feels woefully underrated compared with the acclaim of their past minstrelsy. Even with a greater focus on mid-paced songwriting, his aggressive performance injects plenty of life into the music. Most painfully overlooked of all is the bonus track, "Dead Sound of Misery"; although it may be cynically interpreted purely as a variation on "Fly", it surpasses the single with its darker tone, and ties the album together in a way "The New Order" might have otherwise failed to achieve. Long story short; Blind Guardian may have shifted their angle somewhat, but they lost none of the tricks and flair they had picked up over the years.

Such as it is, A Twist in the Myth gets an undeservedly bad rep. Some people have even gone as far as to accuse Blind Guardian of selling out with this album. Hopefully I'm not the only one who knows otherwise. It's not Nightfall in Middle-Earth or A Night at the Opera, nor does it try to be. Hell, it's not even close to their pre-progressive stuff circa Battalions of Fear. What a lot of people seem to forget is that this was arguably a further step for them to take than any of the progressive albums in their career. To continue to satiate listeners with the same degree of bombast was one thing, but to rejuvenate themselves by seemingly going in the opposite direction? By all accounts, A Twist in the Myth should not have worked, nor should I like it as much as I do. And in case my praise is mistaken for preference; I will say I prefer any of the albums they had done prior since Tales from the Twilight World, but that shouldn't be held against the album. Indeed, whenever I've wanted a more grounded experience out of Blind Guardian, nothing but this one will do. It's a shame so many fans don't see it nearly so kindly.