Avantasia - Moonglow

I’ve tried a lot of the super symphonically boosted, hyper operatic neoclassical metal out there in the past, and my experiences with the array of work I have looked into has largely shown me that it’s not really my favorite subgenre of metal. While there are exceptional standouts that make a strong case for the potential the elemenuts of the genre can have together in the right orchestration, most of what I have heard from this cheesily numbing, theatrical a side of metal is not too flattering of the wedding of sounds in the style, which is ironic considering how often metal and classical music are compared and considered to be kindred souls.
Nevertheless, Avantasia’s music has been no exception to the ineffective overdoing of theatrics that characterizes the style, and originally I wasn’t going to check out Moonglow. But I eventually did on kind of a what-the-hell basis. I had seen a lot of hype, albeit label-generated hype rather than organic hype, around the album. Only seeing excitement for the album in adspace was a premonition that didn’t bode well for me at the time, but I was willing to believe that the label’s faith in the album was in something fans and critics were just going to take some time to come around to or recognize.
Well, I gave this album its fair chance, a couple chances, and though I wish I could say it lightened my mood toward neoclassical power metal, alas, Moonglow is not that album.
Drenched in gaudy string arrangements and massive choir support, the album falls into all the usual pitfalls of the genre, basing its appeal far too heavily on the brief novelty of its sonic pallet and too little on its compositional use of it. And speaking of misuse, the guest vocalist line-up on this thing shows quite how big budget it was. Yet it’s all for naught as none of the singers brought on here really do anything to bring individual flair or personality to the album, and because they’re all so stylistically similar, they all kind of just blend together after awhile, making for quite a waste of such a huge feature list. With so little to separate it from the rest of the average in its field, it’s another overcooked, underwritten symphonic neoclassical metal album that isn’t really shifting my heart toward the style in general (a feat Sleep’s The Sciences did for me last year with its undeniable amp-worshiping stoner metal majesty). Unlike my experience with Sleep last year, I really have tried this album in every realistic format and context I can think of, and it’s just not doing it for me.
It has a few moments when it breaks away from the like the simple, but infectious and moving classic heavy metal riff laced throughout the song “Alchemy”, the slightly proggy mood dynamics of “The Piper at the Gates of Dawn”, and the grandiose (slightly alternative metal-tinged) opening of “Requiem for a Dream”.
But the album is unfortunately more fully represented by the stale Shakespeareianism on ice of songs like “The Raven Child” and “Ghost in the Moon”, which is still more bearable than the lowest of low points on the album like the melodramatic balladry of “Invincible” and the annoying vocal lines on the title track’s chorus. But then there’s the symphonic metal rendition of the famous Michael Sembello synthpop hit, “Maniac”, rounding off the track list, which had me throwing my hands up and walking away to wash them of this album altogether the first time I heard it, knowing about a minute in that there was no way the band could save that foreseeably terrible decision of a cover.
And that’s about all I want to say about this album really. It’s a foreseeable mess of a record that I could have avoided if not for my morbid curiosity, which I should start listening to the impulses of less.
On the cob/10

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