A TWIST IN THE MYTH

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.

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