In the past when talking about Rhapsody, I have always cited the drunken "triple fried egg butty with chili sauce and chutney" analogy from Red Dwarf. This details the idea that even though this sandwich is a conglomerate of things that are so obviously wrong together that came from a recipe in a book on bacteriological warfare, somehow the end result is something brilliant. But having finally bought a couple of Rhapsody albums at an unlikely local music shop when on our weekend away at the start of the month, I can now look at them them more closely - from two opposite ends of the band's career, having simultaneously got Rhapsody: Symphony of Enchanted Lands and Luca Turilli's Rhapsody: Ascending to Infinity. (More on the name change in the second half of these posts - it's even better than you might think.)

So, examining Symphony of Enchanted Lands first, let's start with the undeniable and get it out of the way - this band is completely, almost painfully ridiculous. Their music is based on a continually expanding high fantasy storyline throughout the albums which concerns the continuing quest for an Eemrild Swoad, as strongly hinted by the Amiga role-playing game cover artwork pictured here. This is the second album, and the story so far is laid out at the start of the booklet in all caps in the world's second most unreadable font after Wingdings, told without the benefit of a proofreader:

And time had come... At the first light of dawn we were already far from the green Elgard and soon the dusty Argons glade and the hills, where the old dwarf lived together with the secret of the keys, made their appearance.

I had to read this about five times just to make sure I wasn't going mad or losing my grasp of the English language. And after kjorteo had talked about Luca Turilli when we were going through Anghel's storyline in Hatoful Boyfriend, I caught myself thinking about the other end of the joke while reading through it - it really does now sound like it was written by our overdramatic... crazy bird friend. Comprehension is not helped by the way that just about everything and everyone's name begins with A, and it makes it even more confusing than ever having to keep track of the city of Ancelot, where Airin has been captured by the forces of Akron and is being rescued with the assistance of Aresius and Arwald the Abbot of Aeiou.

But just like whenever I try to cook anything unsupervised, there is one vital ingredient in all of this silliness that I had overlooked - the musicianship is extraordinary. Luca Turilli has a huge amount of compositional and instrumental talent, and this alone turns what should have logically been comical into something amazing - meanwhile, the vocals by Fabio Leone are clean and melodic while mangling the pronunciation sufficiently to disguise some of the dodgier lyrics.

The album opens with Emerald Sword and Wisdom of the Kings, fast and wonderfully memorable pure power metal songs in a row with added harpsichords and trumpets. After that it gradually slows down into longer, slower-paced songs as it heads towards the obligatory ballad Wings of Destiny, an acoustic piece with pan flutes that sounds for all the world like a world map theme from a Final Fantasy game. The rather contradictarily-titled The Dark Tower of Abyss is probably the highlight of the neoclassical (if you don't think "pretentious" would be a better word) elements of the album, very baroque and harpsichord-driven. And it concludes with a thirteen-minute title track, a mostly instrumental piece with Celtic influences that incorporates some operatic female vocals, violins, and even bagpipes (though they are kept to a low volume and so this can be still be listened to with only low-level hazard equipment).




And it all works very nicely. It does have a couple of drawbacks, though, the first of which is a question of distinction between the track titles - there are songs concerning the Gates of Infinity, Wings of Destiny and Winds of Eternity virtually back to back, and there are exactly two tracks on the entire album that don't follow the [Suantum] of [Quolace] naming pattern.

The other, rather greater problem is the spoken sections that appear on some of the tracks - they are so mindbogglingly atrocious that I feel the need to reassure you that this isn't someone on Something Awful making fun of it by reading it out melodramatically - this is seriously what they put on the album. (The videos linked above are also genuine, while I'm on the subject.) I know that it's virtually a law of the universe that power metal narration cannot be anything more than hysterical, but this truly is something special. The narrator is credited as "Sir Jay Lansford", and there was speculation on the Internet that this was just a pseudonym made up by Fabio - I would certainly have loved it if he really had ramped up the role-playing element by coming up with an Algernon Fotherington-Carstairs pseudonym to play a part in the story. However, after some further digging by ravenworks, it seems that Sir Jay is actually real (but his title is not) - and I think I find it even more unbelievable that they specifically hired someone to do it that badly.

It's all great fun, though. As I mentioned at the beginning - somehow, just by ignoring how painfully ludicrous they should be, neither reining it in nor making any effort to point it out, it all comes together to make a surprisingly nice sandwich, or something like that.