Oceans of Time

What a disappointment this turned out to be. I'm a big fan of power metal. It's probably right behind thrash as my favorite style and I'm always on the hunt for more. Across my "travels" came this band and boy, was I excited! Look at all of those glowing reviews! With support like that, you'd figure it's impossible to go wrong so I closed my eyes and picked this one out. Cool album artwork (even if purple doesn't happen to be my favorite color), some epic song lengths and an apparent new line-up that was probably hungry to prove itself. Skipping past the pointless intro, the first up was Pay the Price.

Honestly, I could review just this song because it's an example of everything wrong with this album: repetition and being overlong. There's a good 3 or so minute long song here. Axel tends to focus on one or two riffs and uses that as the ENTIRE song. The vocalist or whoever writes the lyrics is terrible at writing choruses. There's an occasional catchy line, but most are just the song title repeated over and over. When in moderation, it's alright. A lot of death and thrash bands do that, but the difference is that they usually don't ride it for a full minute without variation. Cut each 6 minute plus song in half and you'd have a decent if not spectacular album.

The worst offender is probably the longest song on here, the Gates of the Seven Seals. Here's that wonderful chorus:

Beyond the gates
Of the seven seals
Beyond the gates
They cry for you and me
Beyond the gates
Of the seven seals
Beyond the gates
Another world
Beyond the gates
Of the seven seals
Beyond the gates
They cry for you and me
Beyond the gates
Of the seven seals
Beyond the gates
Another world

Beyond the gates is a phrase you'll learn to despise. The instrumental section isn't any better. From roughly 6:00 to 8:00 minutes, there's nothing, but the same plodding riffs over and over with some "ominous" sound effects. Lightning! Thunder! Shitty wah effects! Actually, wait... that's not thunder, it's just Jorg's boring kick-snare-kick pattern that's relied on way too much for such a long song. Again, cut this song in half and you'd have...half the shit, but it'd be better than the original 10 minute rain of diarrhea.

There are some positives about this album. The production is pretty good. The only noticeable detraction I can point out is the complete lack of bass. Gates might have had a decent bass fill, but I'm not quite sure if it wasn't a hallucination induced by repetitive chorus syndrome. Axel is pretty good guitarist and avoids from falling in a lot of trappings a lot of solo guitarists fall into like making the song exist only for the solo. The songs actually feel like songs and not just rhythms for him to solo over. They're terrible songs, sure, but he at least tries. Johnny Gioeli is an excellent vocalist and it's a shame for him to be wasted here.

Axel reminds me of Annihilator's main man Jeff Waters. Tremendous guitarists who shred and emote with the best of them. The only thing holding them back from being powerhouses is their complete lack of being able to write anything compelling. This might be a bit too harsh on Axel as I haven't heard all of his work, but considering this album is number seven for him, it's not really a stretch to assume this is what is to be expected. Maybe it's just me. I'm not a fan of the euro power metal scene that relies too much on the vocal melody to carry their compositions to the point of redundancy (Hi Tolkki!) so maybe this is alright for you. Everyone else, stay away.

Back in 1999 for the first time I listened to Axel Rudi Pell and this was the first CD that I listened and it after listening to Pay The Price I got really interested on it and started to look for more stuff from them and all their previously CD's are really great but Oceans Of Time, their first with vocalist Johnny Gioeli, is their best CD up to date.

All members of this band are tremendous players and that makes this CD even more powerful and amazing. For fans of the band that was used to listening the great voice of Jeff Scott Soto on Axel's previous CD's and thought would be missing Jeff, at the moment Johnny steps in "Pay The Price" you can note his vocals are awesome and forget about Jeff.

After the intro and the great "Pay The Price" comes "Carousel", another rocker songer with a sing-along chorus that sticks in your mind for some time. Other songs in this style are "Ride The Rainbow" and "Living On The Wildside" which are really great too.

Axel is known as a great composer of ballad songs, there is not even one ballad song from Axel that I don't like, and two of his best are on Oceans Of Time, the self-titled one and the amazing long-ballad "Ashes From The Oath" with Johnny singing up to his high notes and this ballad is also remembered as one of his bests due to Axel's solo in the end of it.

In all of Axel CD's there is one epic song and the one in this CD is "The Gates Of The Seven Seals", a hell of a song that would be amazing to listen to it in a live concert and if one day Axel comes to Brazil I will ask for this song the whole concert.

To finish the CD comes "Holy Creatures" another amazing song with a different start and a strange sound in Johnny's voice but is really well-done and the chorus is another one that sticks in your mind for some time.

Axel Rudi Pell is a longstanding German metal band playing in the classic 80s style of Dio and other similar bands, with excellent guitarwork courtesy of the band's core and founder, Axel Rudi Pell. They've apparently had a very long string of lineup changes, with about four or five different vocalists, before settling on their current one, Johnny Gioeli. It was on this album that he made his debut in the band, and what an album it is.

The album starts off with a short intro piece before kicking off into the high-speed double bass cooker "Pay the Price." It's a standard Power Metal song, with an extremely catchy chorus. Not much to say, but it's a good song. Not great, but it does well to open the album and introduce us to the band. Next up is the 8 minute "Carousel", one of the best songs on the album. It's midpaced, with a shockingly simplistic riff and a catchy chorus. Most bands would end a song like this after maybe 4 minutes, but ARP lets the music play, showing their considerable musical talents and creating long songs that never bore you, if you're into this style of music. "Carousel" is a perfect example; sailing on for 8 whole minutes, rocking the whole way with such simple riffs and musicianship, but never becoming dull or trite.

"Ashes from the Oath" is another album highlight, starting off as a moody ballad, showing off Gioeli's considerable vocal talents for a good 4 or 5 minutes and delivering some killer lyrics and guitarwork, before speeding up to a huge hurricane of speedy riffs and blazing solos in the last half of the song. Absolutely splendid. The highlight of the album, and probably my favorite song here. "Ride the Rainbow" is the shortest song here, a catchy little rocker with a great chorus and explosive soloing.

"The Gates of the Seven Seals" is a great song, coming in at almost 11 minutes. The riff that carries throughout the song is again very simple, yet great. The chorus is extremely catchy, and the whole thing just bleeds 'epicness.' This song revokes the great 80s metal bands again, in a tour de force of spectacular guitar and drumwork. Check it out if you enjoy metal at least a little bit. "Oceans of Time" is the last truly great song here, one of the best ballads I've had the pleasure of hearing. The solo is, again, incredible, and this beautiful piece of music goes on for 7 minutes before coming to an end, like the tides on the beach at sunset.

"Prelude to the Moon" is where things start to dip off into mediocrity. It's a neoclassical sounding instrumental, with only the guitars and keyboards throughout it's 5 minute duration. It's not a bad song at all, but it doesn't meet the standards of tracks 3-7. "Living on the Wildside" is a filler, with nothing to make it really stand out. Same goes for "Holy Creatures", although that song does have a rather odd little outro that's more creepy that humorous.

Overall, this is a great album from a very good band. It could benefit from re-arranging the tracklist, though, and not having three mediocre songs right next to eachother at the end. "Ashes from the Oath" or the title track would've been a fitting end to the album, and they could've mixed up the good songs with the so-so ones. Just a small mistake, and it doesn't ruin the great songs here, which are by far some of the best metal songs I've ever heard. Highly, highly recommended.

To any trustee of metal in its more traditional form, it goes without saying that the 90s was a bad time for the art form, but the underground was still booming outside of the continental U.S. by the midpoint of the decade and its twilight years saw some truly exciting developments. Much of this was spearheaded by the ascendant power metal revival renewing interest in much of Europe, and a country such as Germany was an ideal place to ride the rising tide of roaring speed, lofty melodies and fantastical storytelling. For his part, guitarist Axel Rudi Pell was something of an outlier in that the rise and fall of heavy metal did little to impact his output, but even while off in his own world of mid-80s melodic fanfare and medieval mysticism, he was far from indifferent to what was going on in metal circles at the time. The acquisition of famed Yngwie Malmsteen's Rising Force vocalist Jeff Scott Soto and former Rage drummer Jorg Michael into his project for the 1992 Eternal Prisoner album showcased a clear pivot towards something a bit faster and more ambitious than the rock-based material of his tenure with Steeler (Ger) in the 80s, though it would not be until 1994 follow up Between The Walls where he would truly codify his take on a hybridized sound of newer power metal influences and his older traditional template, leading to a string of highly engaging albums with both aforementioned players and an assembly line of competent keyboardists in the mid-90s.

Towards the end of the decade this rising tide of interest in power metal was ceasing to be an underground phenomenon and was becoming commercially viable, at least insofar as metal could have been in the post-arena era that the 90s were. Faced with the loss of Soto and the promise of Jorg's departure after the completion of what would be their seventh studio album, 1998 saw Pell at something of a crossroads in the midst of an ongoing melodic metal revolution. The resulting masterwork that is Oceans Of Time, ironically enough, came into being upon the foundation of what can be best described as a compromise. Jorg Michael's continued participation along with Axel's continued adherence to the same formula that had produced Between The Walls and all that followed kept the band's quick-paced power metal tendencies at the fore, while the acquisition of early 90s arena rock outfit Hardline's front man Johnny Gioeli and Rough Silk's Ferdy Doernberg on keyboards would pull things a bit closer to their current and admittedly more subdued sound. From the vantage point of hindsight, this would amount to an album that was the best of both worlds, as Gioeli's gritty, Ronnie Dio-inspired snarl proves equally functional in the mystical world of Pell's compositions to that of Jeff Scott Soto, if not more so given that Axel has regularly exhibited a lyrical and musical affinity with the Man on the Silver Mountain going all the way back to the earliest days of this band.

Yet in spite of the slightly more AOR-like character brought into the equation, the mystique of Axel's songwriting and lyrical craft provides for an album with all the same otherworldly trappings that graced Black Moon Pyramid and Magic. Opting for a somewhat more baroque prelude with a droning church organ and harpsichord line accompanying the spacey atmosphere and roaring winds, "Slaves Of The Twilight" provides a straightforward introduction to what is a stylistically streamlined, yet also heavily deep and expansive auditory excursion. Though this album's speed-infused opening kick to the guts, "Pay The Price" proves to be a longwinded version of what is usually shorter fair at a whopping 6 minutes, fusing together Jorg's cruising kit work and Pell's more old school, Deep Purple infused riffing style. The resulting sound could best be likened to how mid-80s Dio or Accept might sound with Ingo Schwichtenberg handling the drums, and when combined with a heavily retro style of guitar shredding caught somewhere between Blackmore's work with Rainbow and Vivian Campbell's seminal work and a wicked organ solo out of Doernberg to make Jon Lord nod in approval, makes for a truly unique spin on a style that was considered dead almost a decade prior. This format is replicated on the album's similarly swift and slightly more mysterious closer "Holy Creatures", and also for a brief stint on the colossal yet somber epic ballad "Ashes From The Oath" during its climatic moments.

While the more kinetic moments on this album make for a truly spellbinding 1-2 punch of retro-80s speed metal fun and late 70s rock riff trappings, the most memorable points prove to be the slower and more expansive ones. Apart from a couple of shorter, rock radio-tinged bangers like "Ride The Rainbow" and "Living On The Wild Side", each listening like potential B-sides from Dio's Sacred Heart with a more bluesy lead guitar feel, Pell's formula during this album's pinnacle songs is clearly tilted towards a hybrid of the longwinded approach of Rainbow's Rising and this band's throwback 1985 sound. The ultra-catchy rocker "Carousel" has a similarly straightforward, AOR character to that of the two shorter aforementioned songs, but draws things out to about double the length in what can be best described as an extensive, guitar-driven jam, a definitely boon for shred fans who still want a sing-along romp to go with all the solos. On the other side of the coin is the somber and sentimental ballad of a title anthem "Oceans Of Time", which really fleshes out Axel's blues influences while also painting a vivid and haunting atmosphere. One would be remiss not to note the brilliant neo-baroque composition "Prelude to the Moon (Opus #3, Menuetto preludio)", which takes Yngwie's conception of an instrumental and dials it back to a missing link between said artist and that of Iommi and Blackmore. But the absolute coup de grace is the extended, fist-pumping ode to the apocalypse "The Gates Of The Seven Seals", which merges the epic jamming feel of Rainbow's "Stargazer" with the chilling aesthetic of 80s Black Sabbath, featuring some of the most brilliant riffs and melodic hooks to ever flow from Pell's creative arsenal.

The question of what truly comprises a perfect album is one that will likely be debated until the end of days, but the archaic definition of the term being the fulfillment of an object's potential (as opposed to being flawless) is a profitable one as it brings a needed sense of relativity to the concept. In this respect, Oceans Of Time satisfies the standard, being the most balanced amalgam of Pell's rawer and more underground sound of the early to mid 1990s with first Rob Rock and then Jeff Scott Soto at the helm, and the more polished and commercially viable one that would proceed in the 2000s and rode the same tide that brought younger outfits like Mob Rules and Hammerfall into prominence. At the same time it's a bittersweet conclusion of an era as the kinetic power metal feel that made this band's earlier work would taper off significantly following Jorg Michael's exit from the band. One can't help but speculate just how different Masquerade Ball might have sounded with him at the kit, not that the Mike Terrana albums are subpar by any other standard than maybe next to this shining prototype of ARP and Gioeli incorporated. As with any album that turns back the clock on metal's rich history, the surprises found on here are few and far between, but the one that really counts is that magic that occurs when a well-conceived signature riff meets a soaring voice carrying a fantastical lyric. Though a bit cryptic and translated through the distorted lens of a dream, Pell has proven a master at this art, and Oceans Of Time is and will continue to be his finest hour.

Rewritten on October 23rd, 2020.