The Sound Cellar: RHAPSODY: Symphony of Enchanted Lands II

Friday, May 23, 2008

RHAPSODY: Symphony of Enchanted Lands II - The Dark Secret

Produced by Luca Turilli and Alex Staropoli

Released: 2004

This is the second part of the Enchanted Lands saga that Italy’s most gloriously over-the-top band began in 1998. It is quite rightly labelled a symphony because, honestly, this album isn’t really metal and barely even rock.

Symphony of Enchanted Lands II is about as heavy as a tissue box and as metal as the tissues inside. It’s classical music with the occasional intrusion of rock instruments, mostly keyboards with some guitars now and then. Indeed, Luca Turilli’s guitar is buried so low in the mix the riffing is almost non-existent. Once in a while, he does come to the fore, most notably on the sprawling “Sacred Power of Raging Winds” when the guitar takes on the lead violinist role in an extended interplay with flutes, which sound synthesised but apparently are not.

Overall however, this doesn’t offer much more than what Rhapsody has done previously, even if, with the use of a 60-piece orchestra, a choir and veteran actor Christopher Lee providing the narrative parts, it is significantly more impressively executed than before. The band’s obsession with Lord of the Rings-style sagas is almost grossly out of hand, with entire lyrical passages virtually torn directly from Tolkien’s pages and no matter how hard they try it’s difficult to take songs with lines like “The dragons are flying in the blue skies” seriously. Fabio Leone’s vocals let the side down as well, wavering between excellent to close to awful and try as he might he still can’t quite get a grip on English phrasing. Lee’s work is, as you’d expect, nothing short of brilliant here, but rather than help the story it sometimes gets in the way: this album is 72 minutes long and the narrative sections take up almost a quarter of that time.

Rhapsody’s fans most likely really enjoy this but it is really far too pompous and overdone for anyone else.