The Wake of Magellan

Dead Winter Dead	Edge of Thorns 1997 reissue on Edel of their 1993 Concrete album with anacoustic version of 'Believe' added as a bonus track, for atotal of 14 selections.	Streets: A Rock Opera Includes Never Before Released Bonus Track: 'desiree'.	Beethoven's Last Night Trans-Siberian Orchestra's first two recordings, a pair of late-'90s Christmas albums, hinted that some day TSO might evolve into a latter-day ELO or even an ELP. Instead, this overwrought concept album shares more common ground with ALW (Andrew Lloyd Webber) or Meat Loaf. TSO, i...	Gutter Ballet 1997 reissue on Edel of their 1989 Concrete album with anacoustic version of 'All That I Bleed' added as a bonustrack, for a total of 12 selections.
Hall of the Mountain King Swedish release of strictly limited edition LP picture disc (1000 copies) of the progressive heavy metal band's classic 1989 album features 11 tracks. Vinyl Maniacs. 2004.	Handful of Rain	Power of the Night 1997 reissue on Edel of their 1985 Concrete album with anacoustic version of 'Sleep' added as a bonus track, for atotal of 11 selections. The album also carries a 'ExplicitLyrics -- Parental Advisory' disclaimer on the back.	Poets & Madmen Aside from a loyal cadre of fanatics, the record-buying public has not been kind to this long-running band's mountain of concept albums. The formula of pomp and pretense sours somewhere between the loftiness of its conception and the bare tediousness of its execution. While poten...	The Lost Christmas Eve If you're looking for something out of the ordinary for the season, The Lost Christmas Eve is for you. This final entry in the Trans-Siberian Orchestra's rock opera trilogy is perhaps their most ambitious and complex in the series. Like its predecessors, The Lost Christmas Eve te...

Savatage - Their Best
"Wake" is my favorite Savatage album and the one where I think the band really put all of their strengths together as a cohesive whole. The lineup was expanded to a 6 piece on this one with Al Pitrelli and Chris Caffery sharing guitar duties and Zach Stevens / Jon Oliva combining on the vocals. The album is a rock opera that tells the story of a descendent of the explorer Magellan and.......well it's complicated. The booklet features a written narrative that explains the story in more detail. I really love everything about this album and it remains one of the top progressive metal discs in my entire collection. The music is consistently top notch and the duel Oliva / Stevens vocals are killer throughout. I love every song on the disc with the final two tracks "The Storm" and "The Hourglass" being my favorites. The album shares a lot of similarities with the bands alter ego Trans Siberian Orchestra, without the bloat that has sometimes impaired TSO's output. "Magellan" is Savatage at the absolute top of their game and I would recommend this album to anyone who enjoys good progressive metal. For Savatage fans this disc is essential.

Great!
I love everything Savatage, but this has to me one of my favorites as well as Poets and Madmen. The band got better with every album even though the spirit of Criss remains, you can hear it in every song.

Another concept album??? Well OK guys, if you say so... 3.5 stars
In one of his reviews for a Savatage album Martin Popoff made the point that Savatage have little to say, but plenty of thirsty power riffs with which to speak their piece. And I suppose that is a very valid observation given this bands propensity for concept albums. They need a story to hang their songs onto and around. This has led to some beautiful work such as the lovely Dead Winter Dead and the fairly lacklustre Poets and Madmen. This album falls somewhere in the middle of the two. The story line here is one of human rights issues and the idea of standing up against organised crime and the evil that can come calling when good men do nothing, neatly tied into a subplot involving an elderly mans search for meaning and purpose. With a range of mellower numbers on this album such as the first two tracks and later gentle musings and subdued passages in some of other songs it's easy to see how Jon Oliva feels this album was in some ways not really a Savatage album and more a progress towards the Trans Siberian Orchestra. And the use of repeating motifs on a couple of spots on the album backs up this assertion. However there are still a number of Savatage trademarks. The guitar flourishes that dance throughout numbers such as Morning Sun are utterly evocative of Savatage, Al Pitrelli here showing his class and ability to be very much a hard rockin' guitar chameleon, a master of many metallic styles. Also present are the fine fine vox of Mr Zach Stevens. So many times when a band changes vocalist there are always complaints about how the new guy isn't as good. Due to his quality Stevens avoided too much of this nonsense given it was obvious to everyone that he was in a range of ways a far better actual singer than Oliva. But that's to take nothing away from the emotive and visceral effect that is produced when Oliva cuts loose as he does on Paragons of Innocence which is actually one of the mid paced metal cruisers of the album. This track in addition to Blackjack Guillotine as well as Complaint in the System (Veronice Guerin) form the triptych of metal that anchors much of the less face melting tunes that surround them and anchor this release firmly in the hard rock and metal sphere. Despite the fact that surely the budget was a little tight and with six band members to feed now production values are fine. Perhaps not the sort of lush super smooth production as per a Sascha Paeth/Miro styled knob job you'd get if the album had of been recorded in the 00's but it's fine for the job, plenty of power in the riffs and the slightly older fashioned production job at least lets the songs breath which is something of a boon as if every nook and cranny was filled with noise, an aural wall so to speak, well then the album wouldn't speak so clearly musically. For all the positives, this album may of come as a bit of a shock for long time Savatage fans who would perhaps have hankered after more belters and less introspection. And newcomers should beware that if they like this album they shouldn't necessarily go and buy the bands entire catalogue outright. Instead move backwards through albums like Dead Winter Dead and Edge of Thorns rather than jumping all the way back in time to, say, Hall of the Mountain King which is from a time when this band were far more full on metal than by '97 when this quality but somewhat different album came out.

If You Like Trans-Siberian Orchestra
For the true fans, this is where it all started! I can't say enough about this band! Grab it! You won't be sorry!

"HE PUT ON THE MAST ALL THE CANVAS SHE'D TAKE/....THE SHIP WAS HIS COFFIN THIS MOMENT HIS WAKE"
There's something catchy about good music combined with a story of the sea, e.g. The Southern Cross by CS&N or A Pirate Looks at 40 by Jimmy Buffett. But there is much more than just that in this CD: it is loaded with imagination and talent, a combination I can't resist. This work of art has been around for nearly 10 years and I feel a bit stupid for not "discovering" it until now. But hey, better late than never! And when you start a whole new music listening adventure when nearly 60 years old, it takes some time to catch up with all the good stuff already out there. After listening to the CD only once, I knew I would give it five stars based only on the music, which includes aspects of power, progressive and symphonic metal. But then I opened the insert and found the rest of the story. The first two pages show two newspaper articles about real incidents, one involving an ocean freighter captain who threw young stowaways overboard, the other an Irish newswoman who was killed by drug lords who she continued to expose even though they had warned her. Then the songs, alternating with poems, tell a story which weaves the two real events into the fictional life of an old sailor who is contemplating suicide. As he walks along the beach, he has a conversation with the ocean and encounters, among others, a young man who has died of an overdose. Both the songs and the poems are loaded with rhyming, which reflects part of the imagination and talent involved. My title is an example from The Hourglass, the last song of the story, and this is an example from one of the poems: Each man has a soul/That struggles to escape/And in the shallows of his dreams/We can often see its wake. OK, OK, maybe I'm attracted to this CD because I'm an old geezer of 60; not as old as the sailor, but old. And maybe having recently lost an 18 year old son to suicide has something to do with it. (Not only was the sailor contemplating suicide, but in the song Another Way, one of the stowaways who drowns is identified as being 18 years old.) But I don't think that has any bearing on my rating. After all, 40 other reviewers gave it five stars also, and it is very unlikely that any of them fit my profile. The work ends with a poem and these are the last four stanzas: FOR YOUNG AND OLD ARE ALL ALIVE ON THAT NEXT BEAT ON WHICH WE RIDE AND THAT BEAT IS SUCH A FRAGILE THING IN BOTH OLD MEN OR YOUTHFUL KING AND THAT BEAT STANDS ALL ALONE YOU SEE BETWEEN US AND BLACK ETERNITY AND UNTIL THAT TIME WHEN DEATH WON'T WAIT LET EACH MAN RAGE AGAINST HIS FATE (Please see my profile for a brief discussion of my rating philosophy.)