Avantasia – The Wicked Symphony

Normally, Tobias Sammet has a day job as the lead singer in German power metallers Edguy. Their biggest problem are that they play, well, German power metal, not my kind of thing. That used to be Avantasia’s problem as well. Avantasia are Sammet’s side project, a metal opera featuring a whole bunch of different singers. The two first albums, The Metal Opera (2001) and The Metal Opera Part 2 (2002), were much in the power metal vein, but slowly things have started to change. The 2008 follow up The Scarecrow left a lot of the power metal behind and concentrated more on melodic metal and hard rock and that was the album when I discovered Avantasia for real. The album sported som fine vocalists like Bob Catley (Magnum), Jorn Lande, Michael Kiske (ex-Helloween) and even Alice Cooper, making the record a way bigger deal than its two predecessors.

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