This album has a long history. A four year gestation period that guaranteed the birth of a fully formed and fleshed out melodic rock/metal hybrid of gargantuan proportions.
Early reviews have not been particularly kind. Ignore them. This album has everything. Soaring melodies; compact choruses; urgent, driving keyboards; dynamic, rough hewn vocals and majestic guitarwork.
For many, the real hero of
Jorn Lande's last album '
The Duke', was another
Jorn - lead guitarist,
Jorn (Pagan's Mind) Viggo Lofstad.
Once again this extraordinary axe slinger mainlines an already classy album into the rarified blood of spine tingling melodic metal.
With a little help from his friends.
The band comprises Uli (Helloween/Masterplan) Kusch on drums - 'twas he who put the band together - Axel (Masterplan) Mackenrott on keyboards, Steinar (Masterplan) Krokmo on bass, Magali Luyten on vocals, and of course, Lofstad.
This combination of musicians is a marriage made in hard rock heaven. Often the right chemistry is created more by accident than design and although yes, you get what you expect here, '
The Unexpected' adds a twist of something different, a taste of something new.
Take the rockin' rappin' 'Pechvogel', the riveting story of an unlucky cyclist (honest). This track is a beautifully textured, hard edged melodic metal aria that sounds like it was plucked wholesale from some scaled up, cinematic hard rock opera. It's only one of many outstanding tracks. Each and every one demands your attention as the album builds pace and power, purring down the hard rock highway, its eyes firmly fixed on the horizon.
You can hear a clear
AOR influence lurking just below the surface of the anthemic '
This Is Not The Original Dream'. In contrast, the muscularly melodic
'Take Me Home' and old fashioned protest song
'Give Up Once For All' are epic Eurometal.
For a couple of satisfying minutes,
'The Spark Of Ignition' most closely mirrors the music of the bands from which
Beautiful Sin was assembled, then it quickly hits us hard with a striking celtic choir, a pulse raising Gothic chorus and a sparkling axe solo from Lofstad.
That said, album standout by a significant margin - and that's saying something given the uniformly high calibre of the material here - is
'I'm Real', a tuneful, medium paced melodic rock song with faint
Thin Lizzy undertones that suddenly launches into a vertiginous chorus with a skyscraping hook.
The slower pace and dreamy texture of bonus and closing track
'She Is Made Of Rain' seems a little out of step with the preceding material. Had it been sequenced any earlier it would have disrupted the album's flow. That said, it stands up well on its own and provides a fascinating glimpse of
Beautiful Sin's softer side.
For me, '
The Unexpected' is the real deal. It ticks all the hard rock / melodic metal boxes then dares to be different. And it works, every time.
Written by
Brian Wednesday, June 14, 2006
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