My relationship with Avantasia is... complicated to say the least. I feel like the original impetus of the project, the Metal Opera double feature, was a bit too ambitious for its own good, producing a lot of overlong and forgettable tracks, but it justified its existence with some incredible songs like "Final Sacrifice" and the untouchable classic "The Seven Angels". Tobi declared his one-off project to be complete and moved back on to Edguy, but apparently his love of way-too-huge epics and inability to stop shmoozing with his heroes was too much to suppress, and before long Avantasia returned with the Lost in Space EPs leading up to The Scarecrow. From then until 2016, you couldn't fucking pay me to care. Avantasia became one of the most frustrating bands in the world, constantly sucking up all of Tobi's attention, leading Edguy to atrophy in neglect (though I was never huge on them either but at least they tended to know what they wanted to do), belching out bloated albums loaded with gazillion minute epics that put me to sleep, obvious Meat Loaf ripoffs, weak ballads, pompous, overblown grandiosity that amounted to nothing, I just didn't want to sit through it anymore. Avantasia is even my go-to example when I talk about why power metal as a whole has become a frustrating genre, because there are still classic tracks being pumped out left and right, but few fully great albums nowadays. You might have to sit through an hour of "The Toy Master" just to get one "Devil in the Belfry".
And then, somehow, Tobi captured lightning in a bottle in 2016, and unleashed Ghostlights onto unsuspecting listeners. I don't even know why I bothered giving it a chance, I had hated the previous four albums and intended to never listen to this bloated nonsense again, but there was some magnetic pull around it. Maybe I always thought they truly had potential underneath all the pomp and pretentiousness, I dunno, the point is that with Ghostlights they finally delivered. All of the tropes of Avantasia were there but it all just... worked for once. Yeah "Seduction of Decay" is a sluggish bore and "Isle of Evermore" is one of the most insignificant non-ballads ever written, but "Master of the Pendulum", "Unchain the Light", "Babylon Vampyres", "Let the Storm Descend Upon You", and the title track were all unquestionably top-tier power metal supremacy, stage-musical wannabes be damned, it was a great album.
Anyway, all of that buildup leads us to 2019, and the first Avantasia album I had ever looked forward to, Moonglow. Does it act as a worthy followup to that 2016 opus? Or is it an entirely new approach that fully breaks it away from its titanic predecessor? Well like always, Tobi chose what was behind Door #3 and did both and neither, with the added factor of reintroducing all of the problems that kept me away from the band for a decade.
I think part of the problem here is that, and I'm saying this with no evidence whatsoever, I realize, I think Tobi's ego is growing out of control. Avantasia is a real hit now, charting in several countries, embarking on megatours with 3+ hour sets, they're a big deal now. The issue here is that Tobi is and has always been the least interesting part of Avantasia, and I don't think he's quite realized that yet. His name is still officially in the logo, as if he's some vaunted Stephen Spielberg-esque figure whose name deserves equal real estate with the actual title of the project, and the last two albums now (the two most commercially successful ones if I'm remembering correctly) open with tracks with him as the sole singer. It feels like he has to get out front somehow and remind everybody that this is his baby. It doesn't matter that his nasally snarl pales in comparison to the full voiced brilliance of collaborators like Russell Allen or the omnipresent Jorn Lande, Tobi needs to be the one to have center stage at all times. He's like a more intrusive DJ Khaled of metal who elbows his way into the limelight at every turn simply because he has famous friends. His endless quest for quasi-mainstream success has finally paid off, and now he can't even prevent himself from literally dressing up like a ringmaster. Just sit back and let Hansi sing you fucking nerd.
Anyway, enough metashit, I've gone on far too long. The point of this whole diatribe is that Moonglow is back to the old problem Avantasia suffered for so long, it's just bloated and full of itself and just not very spectacular. Granted, there's some residual greatness left over from the previous stunner, but there's a pretty huge stretch near the end of the album where very little of interest happens. Tracks like "Starlight" and "Lavender" feel like pure filler songs, though they are at least sorta fun and kinetic. They are at the very least actual power metal songs instead of the fluffy Bon Jovi shit he loaded The Scarecrow with. Geoff Tate finds himself on weak songs again as well, with "Invincible" being the token terrible ballad that Tobi can't seem to stay away from, and "Alchemy" being a weird thing with chuggy strings and a sluggish pace with two minutes of ideas stretched out to seven and a half. And fuck don't even get me started on the baffling idea to close the album on a cover of fucking "Maniac". Tobi lost his mind years ago and here's yet another example as to what that means.
But I think overall I'm leaving with a positive impression of the album, despite the overwhelming disappointment. The disappointment stems almost entirely from how great Ghostlights was. If that album had never happened, this could well be Avantasia's best album. The nearly ten minute solo-Tobi faux epic of "Ghost in the Moon" aside, Moonglow does an excellent job of putting its best foot forward. "Ghost in the Moon" is too long and thin for its own good, but it does have an incredibly rousing chorus that sets the stage for a huge journey, and for the next few tracks the album truly delivers on that promise. "Book of Shallows" follows and it's potentially the heaviest song Avantasia has ever penned, thanks in part to Mille Petrozza showing up out of nowhere and snarling all over a legitimate thrash riff from left field. That section aside, the track is a fantastic testament to what makes power metal such an entertaining genre when it's at its best. Finally landing Hansi Kursch, a vocalist he's clearly wanted since the beginning, is a huge boon to this track and album as a whole, since both of his appearances are easy highlights. Hearing his bellowing croon on "Book of Shallows" plastered a cartoonish grin on my face, and the mere addition of his voice makes the Blind Guardianisms of the song that much more prominent. It's fast and heavy, and most importantly it's larger than life and just fuckin' huge and fun. What a day for a pastel dream, it just works. It's almost the perfect representation of what Avantasia can be at its best.
I say "almost" because the actual perfect representation is a mere two tracks later with "The Raven Child". This is exactly the type of song that Tobi is always trying to write and only occasionally succeeding at. This is the huge multi part epic that guides the listener through a moving journey of several different themes and ideas, all of which connect. This is what "Ghost in the Moon" should've been, and the utilization of two of the best singers he's ever wrangled into the project (the usual suspect of Jorn Lande and the white whale of Hansi Kursch) only works to the track's advantage. It's generally midpaced and epic as hell, there's an extended quiet section in the middle that acts as a fantastic buffer for the sheer grandiosity of the first and third movements, the multilayered choirs build into this massive explosion of high octane beauty in the climax, the whole thing is just phenomenal. This very well could be the best Avantasia track to date. Yes, even above the astounding "The Seven Angels".
And just since I've touched on almost every track at this point, I'll also throw out the remaining good tracks. "Moonglow" stands as the song I've easily listened to the most, despite "The Raven Child" being what I'd consider the best one. The title tracks is much more succinct and easy to listen to, and it's just all around an incredible pop rock track that deserves all of the mainstream success that Avantasia has been soaking up in recent years. Easily one of the best choruses Tobi has ever penned, and I have to give him kudos for finally utilizing the token female guest vocalist on something that isn't a shitty ballad. "Piper at the Gates of Dawn" is basically just a double-length "Starlight" but it works better, even if it does drag a bit with the lengthy runtime. And just to round it all out, "Requiem for a Dream" is another astounding tune, a high speed attack with frantic bass leads and pummeling percussion. I've never been a Michael Kiske fan but the two altos here help the track soar high above it's grounded ferocity.
So that covers all of it, I don't usually name every single track on an album in a review but Moonglow is so ambitious and such a mixed bag that I can't really avoid it. There are more good songs on the whole, and the best songs are some of the best the band ever wrote, no doubt about it. But the thing that keeps me from truly recommending this is that the bad songs are just so indicative of everything that made Avantasia unbearable for a decade. Moonglow falls back on a lot of the old tricks that Ghostlights so deftly avoided. Tobi has shown that he's fully capable of writing excellent epics, even when they're as self indulgent as physically possible. But he's also shown that he's fully capable of forgetting to make the base of the songs underneath all of the pomp and circumstance worthwhile on their own. At least this time you don't have to sit through an hour of boring bullshit before you hit the good songs, but you still need to wait almost eleven minutes before a single more talented guest shows up, it's still structured in a weird way where it starts and ends on a whimper, it still has a five track stretch of mostly dead air, there's still way too much going on while simultaneously being completely uninteresting, et cetera. To use an old LiveJournal term (and show my age a bit), this is a very good example of "E/N". Everything / Nothing. It's a million words that means everything to the writer and nothing to the reader. I almost revived my cringey old series of When Pompousness Takes Control, but I decided against it because I do still think this is on the positive end of the spectrum on the whole and some of the best songs are the most overblown and overdone, but I do still think Tobi is at his best when he just gets back to basics and stops trying to make every song "Paradise by the Dashboard Light".
RATING: 61%
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