Review: Avantasia “Ghostlights”

Avantasia “Ghostlights”
Nuclear Blast records

Tobias Sammet, certainly, one of the most productive composers at in power-metal. Releasing almost every year he doesn’t lose his originality and creativity. So every new album is ingenious, through it’s not always make listeners to react unequivocal (as it was, for example, with Age of the Joker and Space Police: Defenders of the Crown from Edguy). But the Avantasia project doesn’t disappoint for more than fifteen years. So the new Ghostlights release was perhaps the most anticipated in the first month of 2016. Let’s take a look on it.

I’ll start from cover – it takes to Wicked Trilogy  concept, which give some hope for one more The Scarecrow, for example. That only reinforces hopes for the next masterpiece.

An album starts with huge hit “Mystery Of A Blood Red Rose”, which got around the internet with a first lyric-video. By the way, it sounded more interesting with Meat Loaf’s vocals. Yet it sounds good even without him. Herr Sammet’s composer talent seems to be inexhaustible.

Avantasia will never be itself without big number of guest musicians. This time, besides Michael Kiske and Jørn Lande it can be heard Dee Snider (“The Haunting”) and Geoff Tate (“Seduction of Decay”). That fact, that Sharon den Adel is also appears as guest vocalist cannot fail to pleasure. Beautiful “Isle of Nevermore” was born from creative cooperation.

An album’s musical component is something between Wicked Trilogy and The Mystery of Time. Ghostlights is kind of “classic Avantasia”, where that is nothing definitely new and experimental, but it sounds smooth, powerful and accurately.

There is 12-minutes opus in all Tobias’s best – “Let The Storm Descend Upon You”, and, not afraid of the word, little bit “pop” “Draconian Love” (but the combination of deep Herbie Langhans’s vocals with magic Tobi’s voice wouldn’t leave indifferent female fans). The most powerful and original songs from the album are “Master Of Pendulum” (with Marco Hietala, by the way), “Babylon Vampires” with Robert Mason and “Unchain The Light” (Ronnie Atkins, Michael Kiske).

Ghostlights’s concept is involute and deeply philosophical, as usual. It will be better to quote Sammet himself: “the whole concept of this album deals with questionable ideals you have in life. It depends on which philosophy of life you have. Such ideals can be very different from each other. And it’s about distractions to find cross-fires on the way to find out what you really want from life“. Oh, well

This release, of course, is the next powerful product from genius composer. However, there is nothing special in it. It refers to the previous works in music and in lyrics, so that feeling “I heard it already somewhere” doesn’t leave while listening. Maybe it’s the common problem of all musicians, that wrote all their best that they can. And there are two ways: to make some experiments and bring something from another genres, like Tobias make it in Edguy. Or to stick the selected line, as it goes in Avantasia. Let’s see what happens and hope that the most powerful and loud is all ahead.

Yet, in spite of everything, Ghostlights can be called the best metal release of January 2016.

Devoted fan.