Blind Guardian released “Beyond the Red Mirror” on January 30, 2015 via Nuclear Blast — a landmark album that took four years to complete. The band, a symbol of the German power metal scene since 1984, here united three different choirs and an orchestra with their familiar powerful sound, in a conceptual sequel to the classic “Imaginations from the Other Side.” The combination of thrash and orchestral arrangements is what made Blind Guardian unique in power metal.
Country: Germany
Genre: Power Metal
For fans of: Kamelot, Iced Earth, Sabaton
The listen
“The Ninth Wave” opens the record with a Latin choir, drums and orchestra, in a nine-minute track that moves from fast thrash passages to more progressive points — and strongly recalls the band’s classic period. “Ashes of Eternity” has some of the record’s best riffs, “The Twilight of the Gods” stands out with Hansi Kürsch’s high screams and the wonderful solos, while “The Holy Grail” is another strong point. For most of its length, the record is full of their trademark harmonized guitar solos and multi-layered vocals.
The other face of the record is the big orchestral moments: the opener “The Ninth Wave” and the closer “Grand Parade” — both exactly 9:30 — are imposing, but also the album’s most difficult points, with long intros and finales that distract from the flow. “Grand Parade,” which the band calls “the best song we ever wrote,” gets really good after 5:30, with a wonderful final quarter. The middle of the record, though, is an unbroken winning streak.
A practical problem is the sound: on good speakers the album reveals all its richness — natural drums, deep bass, layers of choirs — but on simple headphones or small speakers it sounds flat, with the details getting lost. Even so, “Beyond the Red Mirror” is considered Blind Guardian’s best album since “A Night at the Opera”: a vast, intense and artistically ambitious work that shows why the band remains a reference point for generations of fans — and why Kürsch remains one of the most distinctive voices in the genre, as he also showed on ACCEPT’s “Losers and Winners.”
See also
The Return of Jon Schaffer: Iced Earth, Sons of Liberty and… · Judas Priest – Invincible Shield
