{"id":18232,"date":"2019-02-17T06:25:30","date_gmt":"2019-02-17T11:25:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/southeastofheaven.com\/?p=18232"},"modified":"2022-01-06T19:48:42","modified_gmt":"2022-01-07T00:48:42","slug":"album-review-avantasia-moonglow","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.southeastofheaven.com\/?p=18232","title":{"rendered":"Album Review: Avantasia &#8211; Moonglow"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>Avantasia \u2013 Moonglow<\/strong><br \/>\n<strong>Release Date: February 15, 2019<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Tobias Sammet has once again stepped away from his ridiculously horrible full-time band Edguy to assemble a cast of characters for his massive epic, conceptual supergroup Avantasia. The first time I ever heard Avantasia was on 2009\u2019s The Wicked Symphony. Up to this point, I had never heard anything like this and I really loved it. I loved the fact that there was an underlying concept but that the concept didn\u2019t overtake the actual performances of great songs such as, \u201cThe Wicked Symphony,\u201d \u201cWastelands\u201d, and \u201cDying for an Angel.\u201d Avantasia has since released four albums including their latest opus, Moonglow.<\/p>\n<p>In listening to this album, it realized that this is not much more than the 4th mediocre take on the extraordinary The Wicked Symphony. I think the songs on The Wicked Symphony were so perfectly sculpted and it was a great example of capturing lightning in a bottle. Every album since has been a miss for me.<br \/>\nMoonglow, while better than the previous three still just comes across as a pompous display of songs that are way longer than they need to be and spotlights unexciting songs that failed to capture me and actually make me feel something.<\/p>\n<p>The opening track, \u201cGhost in the Moon,\u201d starts out promising but then all of the sudden morphed into this excruciatingly long Queen meets Rocky Horror Picture Show nine-minute opus. For some reason, it also reminded me of the movie The Never Ending Story leading me to dub this song, \u201cThe Never Ending Song.\u201d \u201cBook of Shallows\u201d is actually a great song that reminds me of something that should\u2019ve been on The Wicked Symphony. This song also features Jorn Lande ripping shit up so that probably helped a great deal in making this song a good one.<\/p>\n<p><iframe width=\"750\" height=\"422\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/tYvZOe6cmeM?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>\u201cThe Piper at the Gates of Dawn\u201d is another song that was really great but was only as strong as it was thanks to guest vocalists, Geoff Tate, Jorn Lande, and Mr. Big vocalist Eric Martin. This song is definitely a power metal classic and I really enjoyed this song. The one that really sunk this ship was a cover of Michael Sambello\u2019s \u201cManiac.\u201d Why did Tobias even think this was a good idea. If Moonglow was already a sinking ship, this song was the final hit that sank this thing to the ocean floor.<\/p>\n<p>With Avantasia, I feel like Tobias Sammet has run his well completely dry and is now just grasping at straws. I\u2019m sure all of the ProgPower minions out there will just eat this one up and call it album of the year or something but honestly, this had to be one of the biggest wastes of time in 2019 so far. If I got anything out of this album is that Eric Martin, Geoff Tate, and Jorn Lande would sound amazing on a record together, Jorn Lande is still one of the baddest singers in the land, and that I think I could do without ever hearing anything Tobial Sammet has to offer from here on out. I\u2019ll take my Wicked Symphony and enjoy that one with pride.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Avantasia \u2013 Moonglow Release Date: February 15, 2019 Tobias Sammet has once again stepped away from his ridiculously horrible full-time band Edguy to assemble a cast of characters for his massive epic, conceptual supergroup Avantasia. The first time I ever heard Avantasia was on 2009\u2019s The Wicked Symphony. Up to this point, I had never heard anything like this and I really loved it. I loved the fact that there was an underlying concept but that the concept didn\u2019t overtake [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":14,"featured_media":-1,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,277],"tags":[501,2087,2080,2085,2077,180,2078,2090,2084,2086,2079,2076,985,2088,2089,1844,2081,2082,585,2083],"class_list":["post-18232","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-album-reviews","category-music-news","tag-avantasia","tag-classic-rock","tag-classic-rock-blog","tag-hard-rock","tag-hard-rock-blog","tag-heavy-metal","tag-heavy-metal-blog","tag-instrumental-bands","tag-mailchimp","tag-metal","tag-metal-blog","tag-music-blog","tag-nuclear-blast","tag-prog-rock","tag-progressive-rock","tag-psych-rock","tag-psych-rock-blog","tag-psychedelic-rock-blog","tag-tobias-sammet","tag-wordpress"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.southeastofheaven.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18232","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.southeastofheaven.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.southeastofheaven.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.southeastofheaven.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/14"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.southeastofheaven.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=18232"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.southeastofheaven.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18232\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19618,"href":"https:\/\/www.southeastofheaven.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18232\/revisions\/19618"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.southeastofheaven.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.southeastofheaven.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=18232"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.southeastofheaven.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=18232"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.southeastofheaven.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=18232"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}