Somewhere in the early 2010s when I first discovered metal, I went to Wikipedia and looked up all the different metal subgenres. I listened to a few songs from each genre to find out what sound I liked. When I came to Power Metal, Blind Guardian was one of the "prominent bands" listed and I looked at their discography. I love Lord of the Rings and saw they had an album entirely about it, so I listened to Nightfall in Middle Earth and fell in love with Blind Guardian. I didn't know how fortunate I was to start with a band like this. They have a sound unique to themselves. There hasn't been a single band that can convincingly replicate the style. Persuader comes about as close as I've heard. Judicator's vocalist John Yelland also sounds a lot like Hansi.
As I discovered Blind Guardian's discography, the run from Tales from the Twilight Hall to A Night at the Opera was what defined the sound of power metal to me. I'm not a lyric guy. I pretty much don't comprehend lyrics when I listen to music, so the emotion the music inspires in me is the most important criterion for how I judge music. Blind Guardian's music evokes adventure, sorrow, victory, battle, and many other themes of fantasy. The kind of fantasy they evoke isn't the typical clouds and magic dragons, but a fantasy that calls from dungeons deep and caverns old. They feel like tales of mystical journeys, mad wizards, and secret rites.
Somewhere Far Beyond is tied with Imaginations from the Other Side as my favorite Blind Guardian album, and has some of the songs for which the band is most well-known. From start to end, it is an album that I don't skip any tracks on. This re-recording does a great job of giving long-time listeners a different taste of the music. I think many of the songs have an improved sound but don't have the same emotional impact as the original.
From a production standpoint, the drums are louder than the original and pack more punch. The bass is actually audible and you get a few moments where it pops through quite clearly. The guitars are similar to the original, though they seem thicker. Hansi still has a great voice and does a good job at delivering a performance that still feels true to the songs. However, at least in this recording, Hansi doesn't quite have the piercing cries and shrieks that he used to. One of the reasons I loved the '90s Blind Guardian albums was how much of a range Hansi had to his voice. Of course, the march of time affects us all and Hansi's voice is a bit more seasoned here. Hansi does a much better job at enunciating. I couldn't really understand the vocals on the original except here and there (one of the reasons I stopped caring about lyrics). He sounds much clearer here. He also feels a little restrained. The original album almost felt frantic. The instruments and vocals felt like they were about to go out of control. There was still a bit of that speed metal wild card aspect. With the re-recording, it feels much more straightforward.
"Time What Is Time" and "Journey Through the Dark" are the two bangers that open the album and are what suffer the most. "Journey Through the Dark" is my favorite Blind Guardian song. On this recording, it doesn't seem to hit quite as hard vocally. Don't get me wrong, they still sound good and I would gladly listen to them again, but it sounds less like a plucky group of nerds trying to evoke a mystic atmosphere. "Theatre of Pain", "Quest for Tanelorn", and "Ashes to Ashes" are all songs I think are an improvement. The keyboards and orchestration are much larger, making the songs' sound bigger. Hansi's matured vocals make the somber sound of these three tracks have a more cohesive atmosphere.
Both "The Bard's Song", "The Hobbit", and "Somewhere Far Beyond" sound very close to the originals. "The Bard's Song" still evokes that spirit that many power metal fans have of dreaming of fantasy. Everywhere we go, songs of land where we've never gone sing in our heads. "Somewhere Far Beyond" is a song about Stephen King's The Dark Tower series. As I mentioned, I'm not a lyric guy, but what I did hear of the lyrics doesn't evoke the books beyond talking about the Man in Black. It doesn't change the fact that the song is amazing. I love the bells in the chorus. I don't know how the bagpipe plays into The Dark Tower . "The Piper's Calling" is a prelude that appears as a motif in "Somewhere Far Beyond". The tone doesn't evoke the books. Bagpipes, Scotland, and Pipers were never in the books so it is sort of thematically confusing. That's a conflict in both the original and this recording, and it is more of a nitpick than a real critique. I've always felt that "The Piper's Calling" should have just been left off the album. It doesn't do anything other than pad the length.
Blind Guardian hasn't released anything I've listened to that seems half-assed. That trend continues with this album. It is a solid re-recording and is a fun journey back into their old sound. I love early power metal from the '90s. That particular sound seems connected to an atmosphere that died in the mid 2000s. Just about every one of the great power metal bands decided to make ass albums and changed their sound to something much more generic. Stratovarius had their self-titled album, Sonata Arctica had Unia, and Avantasia had their entire discography after The Metal Opera albums until Ghostlights . Bands like Hammerfall brought in this wave of middling mediocre power metal that became popular and the old style has been mostly lost. This album is a solid revisit of the past with a bit of polish, though not as strong an emotional impact as the original.
