Crossroad

This is The Storyteller’s 2nd and final installment of their two part concept album series depicting the fantasy realm of Kail, which borrows heavily from the J.R.R. Tolkein style of High Fantasy tales. While the storyline depicted here does reek of some obvious clichés, the music has take a rather sizable leap forward, owing heavily to a more clearly defined sound, a more measured level of ballad and quiet musical sections, and a more lustrous vocal delivery.

The one thing that really held the last album back was Persson’s vocals, although they fit well with the standard fair of power metal ranges found in bands such as Firewind and Jag Panzer, his high range was really not explored much. Here we see a much more high ended vocal performance, flirting with sounding like a hybrid of Joacim Cans and Eric Adams. Although he does a fair share of banshee wails on all the faster songs, he really gets going on the 2nd half of the album, which is where most of the stronger music is to found.

Although a good improvement on the debut, we still have a lot of music that clings to the Hammerfall/Blind Guardian format of the last album. “The Unknown” is a decent up tempo song but with the exception of a better production and a more bombastic backing chorus; it’s almost completely interchangeable with “Guardians of Kail”. “The Eyes of the Storm” also reeks of heavily of early Hammerfall worship, particularly faster songs off Renegade such as “The Champion”. Our first ballad “Loss of a Friend” also sounds a bit like more recent Hammerfall ballads, though without the sappy love song lyrics.

Some of the better music on here includes the melodic mid-tempo song “A Passage through the Mountains” which sounds a bit like Falconer but with a thicker vocal texture and more lead breaks. The title track has an excellent opening riff and sounds somewhat like various songs off of Gamma Ray’s “Somewhere Out in Space”, though obviously not quite as fast. “Kingdom Above” is our second ballad and sees all the improvements that I have hoped to see on previous album ballad “Like a Wind”, a chorus with a rich harmonic texture, yet still with the same epic feel found on classic Blind Guardian ballads like “A Past and Future Secret”.

The best song on here, by far, is the closing track “The Moment of Truth”. You’ve got all the winning elements of a highly climactic Freedom Call song, combined with the folk melodic tendencies of Blind Guardian and Falconer. The rough vocal growls provided by Bryan Horne of “The Fifth Sun” are also a nice bit of icing on a rather delicious heavy metal cake of speed and fury. They say that the final impression is often what can make or break an album, and in this particular case The Storyteller definitely nailed it.

This album is definitely geared towards fans of Hammerfall, as well as anyone else who was in to the fantasy concept album craze from 1999 to 2002 that was essentially started by Blind Guardian’s “Nightfall on Middle Earth”. Although this is second tier material compared to early works by both these bands, it is still a lot of fun and miles above most of the garbage played on the radio today that people far and wide are all to willing to settle for.