Album Review: Blind Guardian - "Beyond the Red Mirror"

Finally, some professionals.  The end of each musical year is normally crammed with last minute releases and also-rans that labels clean out of their closet before they take a holiday break and begin anew.  2014 was no different, trailing off with an unremarkable pile of sludge that careened through the New Year holiday.

As 2015 dawns it kicks off in part with the new, epic construction of Blind Guardian, “Beyond the Red Mirror.”  The album is the sequel to 1995’s “Imaginations From the Other Side” and looks in again on the science fiction and fantasy of the two intertwined realms.  Some twenty years hence the connections between the two worlds have been mostly severed, leaving only the titular red mirror as the lone gateway. 

The creativity of ideaman Hansi Kürsch is unbridled full force here, coloring in the worlds of “Beyond the Red Mirror” all the way to the margins, creating an impossible landscape of magic and scientific intrigue.  (This is where fans of Demons and Wizards grumble that Hansi and Iced Earth’s Jon Schaffer can’t seem to spare even a little of that creativity into their joint project.)  Kürsch’s vision isn’t merely limited to the idea he’s trying to articulate – rather, the music of Blind Guardian is appropriately creative to match.

As far as organization and implementation and execution are concerned, Blind Guardian is nearly without peer.  The band assembled three different choirs and a full ninety piece orchestra for the creation of “Beyond the Red Mirror,” and the presentation of the album is downright Broadway caliber.  Everything for this gigantic concept record is presented without reservation, from the sweeping guitars of “At the Edge of Time” to the final operatic crescendo of “Grand Parade.”  Every moment here is carefully measured and properly mixed, crafting an aural spectacle which aims to present the listener with a higher class of metal.

It’s worth noting that “Beyond the Red Mirror” plays very much into the hands of power metal and that particular genre’s enthusiasts, so those who look to Blind Guardian as an industry trend-setter in speed metal may find the album marginally wanton.  That said, Kürsch and by extension his band employ one of the smartest tactics they could have for this record: Blind Guardian was willing to go outside the conventions of genre to put out the product they wanted.  If the band had stayed within the narrow confines of metal as we know it, there’s almost no way that this record could have had the delicate orchestration of “The Ninth Wave” or the theatrical bent that spans the entire composition.

On a personal note, “Beyond the Red Mirror” is a lot of wonderful things – it’s bold in scope and daring in magnitude, crafting a whirlwind of guitar, vocals and orchestrated pieces that’s difficult to imagine having to write and assimilate.  As a result of all that careful inspection, I found the album to be a little antiseptic for my taste.  If it’s possible for a record to be too thoroughly calculated, “Beyond the Red Mirror” might be it.  I found the record to be missing immediacy, slightly lacking in that moment-to-moment power that characterizes similar records from Turisas or Orden Ogan.  Add in a touch of off-the-cuff explosiveness and “Beyond the Red Mirror” goes from ‘beautiful record’ to ‘brilliant record.’

Now that said, those were my personal findings, completely reflective of my own tastes.  Objectively, Blind Guardian’s new opus is difficult to find fault with and is a splendid, expansive construction of disparate musical ideas brought under one roof.  There’s an awful lot to like here and this is one of the band’s best records yet.