Entry 814 - Blind Guardian - Nightfall in Middle Earth

Style: Incredibly intricate and expertly constructed power metal

Primary Emotions/Themes: It's like seeing the jewels of a crown crafted meticulously over years and finally everything comes into place

Thoughts: Oh what a wonderful time to be alive. There are very few albums that I consider to be in the upper escalon of music. Fewer yet that make any sort of lasting impact on me. I've always held Blind Guardian in high regards, even as my tastes have moved away from power metal into the more extreme realms of the genre. Blind Guardian are a special band, and Nightfall in Middle Earth is a special album.

This is the album that Blind Guardian had been building towards for a decade. All of the progression that started on Somewhere Far Beyond is realized on Nightfall. The intricacies in the music, the changes in pace, the story telling, the wave after wave of cascading vocals, the lead guitar acting as the conductor of the orchestra, the drums morphing from speed metal to almost a progressive metal approach. All of it. It all came to fruition here. 

As complete of an album that Imaginations is, it lacks the scope of Nightfall. That said there would be no Nightfall without the huge leap in sound that Imaginations brought forward. They are both outstanding albums, but Nightfall is the outright better of the two.

The band incorporates so many different elements into this record. Spoken word passages detailing the narrative of JRR Tolkien's The Silmarillion as it details the war of the First Age (I know it's not purely JRR's work, it has significant contributions from his son as well). These narrations are done expertly, they capture the mood and tone of the war and portray them to the listener as if they were factual history. 

The music in between these tracks is of equal if not higher quality. Blind Guardian has created eleven new songs that are some of the highest caliber in all of the metal genre as a whole... perhaps even beyond. These things are miniature tales in and of themselves. They have the complexity of a classical symphony, and the depth of them as well. 

The lead guitar is the focus, it effortlessly leads the music through it's many twists and turns. The rhythm guitar provides the backdrop for everything else. These two combined create the very core of Nightfall's music. Dancing in-between the guitars is the orchestral accompaniment. They are keyboards, but they are so well produced and written that they may as well be the real thing. 

This intermixes with the vocals... and oh boy do the vocals stand out. Hansi's voice has always been powerful, but here it's another level. Imagine forty layers of his voice overlaid in perfect harmony recounting the fantastical tales of Middle Earth. It's not something that must be imagined, it's real, and it's on this record. 

I'm going to stop myself here. This album must be heard in order to be fully appreciated. Ten thousand words could not do this album justice. For anyone who considers that metal cannot be art, I present to them Exhibit A: Nightfall In Middle Earth.

Written May 10th 2024