Formative Albums, Part 5: Legendary Tales
Legendary Tales by Rhapsody
Somewhere around college, my 104.7 The Edge phase had started to run its course. I still liked the heavier rock/almost-metal trappings of a lot of the bands I'd found from there, and the habit of cryptically posting Mudvayne lyrics in my LiveJournal when I was mad at my SO would take several more years to fully recede, but this was about when the tide started to turn.
I had a roommate who was very into metal, though most of his tastes gravitated toward the more... Cookie Monster end of things. Despite that being something I can do--despite my being the person David turns to whenever he needs death growls for Albion songs--it never was something I particularly enjoy listening to for its own sake. Like, in moderation when used for effect (think Kamelot's "March of Mephistio" or... anything I've done for Albion, really) is fine, but I'd never sit down and listen to a full start-to-finish Dimmu Borgir album. There were many, may times when my roommate would blast something like that through the walls of his room, and I'd briefly ear-perk at the well-done musical introductions, and then the vocals would kick in and I'd be like "... oh."
One day, everything changed. I heard music from his room, and I went through the same sensation of "Oh, I like this start... this is going to be disappointing, isn't it?" Only, instead of gravel in a blender, that intro gave way to a clean-sounding melodic singer, almost as if Journey had become a metal band. (I was sheltered and my reference pool was very limited.) The guitar work was blisteringly fast yet technically sound and beautifully composed, rather than just speed for the sake of noise. They had a keyboardist doing... was that a harpsichord? And all of this with vocals that carried, even elevated the whole experience, rather than instantly ruining it. This was an all new experience for me, and I was in love.
I knocked on his door and demanded to know what he was listening to because it was amazing.
"Rhapsody," he said. Ooh, cool name. I like that.
(Many years later they would change it to "Rhapsody of Fire" and have a dizzying array of spinoffs. Did you know Luca Turilli [band], Rhapsody, and Luca Turilli's Rhapsody are three completely different bands with... *counts* four completely different vocalists? But that Luca Turilli [guitarist] was in all three of them? God bless this incestuous goofy-ass genre. But this was before all that.)
"What... genre is this?" I asked, admitting I'd never heard anything like it before.
He didn't know if there was a term for it, either--he called it "Fantasy Metal" but admitted that was something he'd just made up. However, I now had a solid starting point: the album he was listening to (Legendary Tales, by Rhapsody,) another Rhapsody album also in his collection (Dawn of Victory) and a spinoff side project (King of the Nordic Twilight, by Luca Turilli) that was basically the same thing.
(At the time. This was before we knew the full extent of Luca Turilli's... Luca Turilli-ness. By itself, without any context, King of the Nordic Twilight is basically an early Rhapsody album.)
Looking these acts up, I found that apparently this was called Power Metal, and... well. I've delved through that genre basically ever since, with a few more highly formative albums along the way that I'll be covering in the coming days. I very easily could have made this whole project a list of power metal albums alone, and still had trouble narrowing it down to ten. Let alone including them while also making room for the other genres and influences! Hell, spoilers for the rest of the list but I actually don't have any Allen/Lande albums on here, and they're one of my all-time favorite acts. This genre is vast, is what I'm saying here.
Legendary Tales is where it all began, though, and it's still a fantastic album. If you haven't heard it, please at least listen to "Warrior of Ice" and "Rage of the Winter" sometime; those are the songs that pulled me in, and they're still technical masterpieces. This is a cross-posted entry that originated from https://kjorteo.dreamwidth.org/469032.html. Please leave all comments there; I am no longer actively maintaining my LiveJournal blogs.