BLIND GUARDIAN — Nightfall in Middle-Earth (review)

BLIND GUARDIAN — Nightfall in Middle-Earth album cover

Album · 1998 · Power Metal

4.5/5 · 2011-01-13
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Nightfall in Middle-Earth is the sixth full length album by German band Blind Guardian. It is a concept piece based on Tolkien’s The Silmarillion. This is a landmark album for Blind Guardian for a few reasons, those being:

a) This is the first album that frontman Hansi Kürsch does not play the bass guitar on, due to his wish to concentrate on singing.

b) This is the point in Blind Guardian’s career where they really shake off those speed metal influences and become a fully fledged power metal band.

c) This is often hailed as the definitive Blind Guardian release by their fanbase and the media alike.

There’s just one problem with that last for me, this isn’t my favourite Blind Guardian album, in fact this may just be my least favourite Blind Guardian album, I haven’t really decided between this and their second album Follow the Blind. However there is a reason that Blind Guardian is my favourite band, they haven’t ever made a bad album, so please don’t think by those words that I’m going to give Nightfall in Middle-Earth a bad write up, it’s actually a very good album, but I need to clear the air about it being their best because even from a neutral standpoint, I just can’t see how this is the band’s best album. To me the real definitive works of Blind Guardian are what I like to call their Big 3, namely the three albums that preceded this one, those being Tales From the Twilight World, Somewhere Far Beyond and Imaginations From the Other Side, with the absolute peek being at Imaginations. So with that out of the way, without any further ado, the album.

There are a lot of tracks on Nightfall in Middle-Earth, a total of twenty-two, or at least it looks that way at first glance, once you take away all the interludes you’re actually left with an album that contains eleven songs. That’s a fairly decent amount for an album and these will be the main focus of this review. The other tracks are the intro (War of Wrath) and interlude pieces designed to help advance the story the album tells. There are spoken words in abundance in these tracks, and that in itself is why these tracks are an integral part of the album’s structure, they could have easily just merged all the interlude tracks into the actual songs, and while the album would still work as a whole like that the end result would actually be poorer overall due to taking away the ability to just enjoy the songs as separate pieces, since there are a couple of tracks in particular on Nightfall in Middle-Earth that really stand out for me as some of the best of Blind Guardian and I know that I for one like to play them on their own.

After War of Wrath is over the first song we get is Into the Storm. The change in sound from the previous album is evident at once right down to the sound of the guitars to Hansi’s vocal delivery. This is a pretty good song but it’s not one of the three that I’d consider the real greats of the album. The first of those greats is Nightfall, which has a very folksy feel to it and is the fourth track on the album. The ninth track Mirror Mirror is my next highlight, mainly because of its frankly excellent chorus. And finally there is Time Stands Still (At the Iron Hill), which makes up my three favourite tracks from the album and what I consider to be its gems.

The Curse of Fëanor was actually the first Blind Guardian song I ever heard, that was several years ago now, and here’s the funny thing, I didn’t like it then and to be honest the track still to this day doesn’t really do an awful lot for me, and I’d go as far to say that it alone is one of the reasons why I consider Nightfall in Middle-Earth is be one of the weaker Blind Guardian releases. The main problem here I think is that I just don’t find it very memorable. With other releases I can usually think of a track and hear it in my head, with this one I struggle, it always manages to pass me by without making any sort of an impression.

There are other strong moments in the album, such as the songs Blood Tears, The Eldar and A Dark Passage (the outro of the latter really has a great feel to it with its haunting vocals gradually fading out), but overall Nightfall in Middle-Earth doesn’t make quite the same impression on me as the majority of the group’s other albums to date, and I’m not just talking about my personal Big 3 there. It’s a solid release, but one that is best taken as a whole in order to get the full benefits from it. The tracks that are songs can be taken separately but to me it’s really the three tracks that I singled out above that have the same power if you do so.

Now for an extra note on the Remastered version of the album. Unlike some of the other albums this one only contains the one bonus track but fortunately it’s a real good one, namely Harvest of Sorrow. This is another of those Blind Guardian songs where they start to get folksy and is possible the only reason to what to own this version, because the track is actually one of the best on the release. The downside to this version is that the originally linear notes which contained notes on the concept have been removed.

(Originally written for Heavy Metal Haven)