The heavy metal genre reached its commercial peak in the 1980s, but the metal bands of that decade struggled to keep their momentum as the musical landscape changed in the 1990s. In some markets, metal never regained its original status, and the new decade was challenging for many bands who had been very successful just a few years earlier.
They could not kill the metal, though. Some bands disappeared, but metal itself grew, changed, developed. In America in particular, nu-metal became a thing, along with several harder-edged offshoots of grunge.
In Europe, the 1990s was when power metal come into its own. Bands like Helloween had shown the way, and the new decade saw new bands pick up the mantle and develop music that was fast, powerful, melodic, technical, epic and soaring. The new genre inspired bands from all over the world, including Stratovarius, Rhapsody (of Fire), Sonata Arctica, Angra, Gamma Ray and Symphony X.
And, obviously, Blind Guardian. They are often credited as one of the seminal and most influential bands in the power metal genre.
The German band started as Lucifer’s Heritage as early as 1984, but renamed themselves Blind Guardian in time for their first album Battalions of Fear in 1988. At first they were more of an aggressive speed metal band, heavily inspired by early Helloween, playing fast and furious metal with promising (yet not fully realised) ambitions as far as songwriting and arrangements. Over the next few albums they showed remarkable growth both as musicians and composers. By the third album Tales From the Twilight World (1990) they had become considerably more melodic and “epic” in their approach, using a choir and symphonic influences.
As their skills grew, so did their musical ambitions. They kept developing their technical proficiency, focusing on meticulously arranged music with a strong orchestral flair as well as intricate multi-voiced vocal passages.
Their potential had sprung into full bloom by the time they released their seminal Nightfall In Middle-Earth album in 1998. As the title alludes to, the ambitious concept album is inspired by J.R.R. Tolkien’s stories, but rather than focusing on The Lord of the Rings or any of his best known works, it focuses on The Silmarillion – the collection of stories from Middle-Earth’s First Age.
The band (and particularly the band’s frontman, vocalist, and main lyricist Hansi Kürsch) has always been inspired by fantastic fictional works. They were actually quite quick to look to Tolkien for inspiration, with several songs from the first album onward are inspired by The Lord of the Rings. Elsewhere they delved into the works of Michael Moorcock, Stephen King, Poul Anderson, Michael Ende, T.H. White, Frank Herbert, Peter Straub, Robert Jordan, as well as stories from mythology and legends. Heck, it was not even above them to be inspired by stories from the Dungeons & Dragons universe (the books by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman).
Fans of the band have always enjoyed this side of the band. Over the years, in the eyes of their fans this has personified the band members as travelling storytellers, leading them to refer to the band affectionately as “the Bards.”
In 1994, the band struck up a working relationship with the Danish producer Flemming Rasmussen. Best known for producing Metallica’s classic Ride the Lightning and Master of Puppets albums, Rasmussen ended up producing a trio of classic Blind Guardian albums: Imaginations From the Other Side (1995), The Forgotten Tales (1996), and Nightfall In Middle-Earth. The first two were recorded in Denmark at Rasmussen’s Copenhagen-based studio Sweet Silence. The Nightfall album was the first album to be recorded in the band’s own brand new studio Twilight Hall Studios, located in Grefrath, Germany – not too far from Krefeld, which is where the band originally came from and formed. This has been their creative hub since.
Adapting a work as massive as The Silmarillion was no small undertaking. The band kept the door ajar for other lyrical approaches far into the album writing process, as they weren’t sure they could actually pull it off satisfyingly. This doubt was still there when Hansi Kürch gave an interview to the Brazilian fanzine Rock Brigade early in the album making process: “We’re working hard on it. We’ve done just the instrumental parts, and almost no lyrics. The ones there are done lead us to think that it will be a concept album, but we don’t have everything mapped out yet. When we have, we will see what fits better in the songs and then we will find a title.”
The band still carefully avoided revealing that The Silmarillion was their focus, but fans were nonetheless excited about the notion of a full concept album from the band. Eventually, as the band saw that their idea would work, they started talking more excitedly about it.
The Silmarillion is a collection of stories written by Tolkien about the First Age of Middle-Earth, recounting the troubled history of Beleriand as the Noldor Elves battle with the dark lord Morgoth who stole the Silmarils – the three jewels which contain the light of the world. The epic tales get the musical accompaniment that they deserve, complete with anthemic choruses and bombastic power metal punctuating every dramatic turn. In addition to songs and music, the album contains several spoken parts where parts of the story and lines said by key characters are narrated and/or acted out, complete with appropriate sound effects. This is more than an album with some tunes inspired by the book. This is a full in-character musical adaptation of it, although the songs always take the centre stage.
“It is our intention to stay close to the original story,” Hansi Kürch said in an interview with the Italian journalist Luca Signorelli in 1998 during the making of the album. “We think the final product will contain about sixty minutes of music. It is hard to sum up a so complex story in a disc. So we focused on the part I like the most, and then we chose the single episodes that I felt more interesting and put them inside the songs and the booklet, together with all the pictures and so on, inspired by the Silmarillion. There is a kind of narrative line that holds all the pieces together, but not everyone will understand this… I think everyone should buy the book to really make all the things match together.”
Kürch also alluded that they were balancing on a line as far as using actual quotes from the book. “We still have some things to evaluate for what the copyright matter is concerned” he said at the time, indicating that they were free to write about plot points, characters, and paraphrasing of dialogue, but may have had less leeway as far as using Tolkien’s actual words.
The album’s story is told from the perspective of Maglor, the bard. This character is in the book itself and is one of the seven songs of Fëanor, who made the Silmarils.
The song Nightfall is one of the big emotional moments on the album. The Two Trees (the precursors to the Sun and Moon) which bring light to the world are dying due to being poisoned by the spider-spirit Ungoliant, one of Morgoth’s allies.
Great beauty is lost as the Two Trees die and darkness falls across the world. The only hope for the renewal of the Trees was the Silmarils. Fëanor and his seven sons mourn the destruction wrought by Morgoth, which also includes the slaying of Finwë, Fëanor’s father. He is angered by what happened, and in his rage, decides that vengeance is the best course of action. He swears to get revenge on him in spite of the Valar’s disapproval. He convinces many of the Noldor to follow him back to Middle Earth to get his revenge and reclaim the Silmarils from Morgoth, swearing an oath that no one will stand in his way and live.
No sign of life did flicker
In floods of tears she cried
“All hope’s lost, it can’t be undone
They’re wasted and gone”
“Save me your speeches I know (They blinded us all)
What you want you will take it away from me
Take it and I know for sure
The light she once brought in is gone forevermore”Like sorrowful seaguls they sang
Lost in the deep shades the misty cloud brought
Monstrous it covered the shore
Fearful into the unknown quietly it crept in new horror
Insanity reigned and spilled the first blood
When the old king was slainNightfall
Quietly it crept in and changed us all
Nightfall
Quietly it crept in and changed us all
Nightfall
Immortal land lies down in agony
The band’s line-up had been pretty stable at this point. Vocalist Hansi Kürch and guitarist André Olbrich are still the ever-present founding members since their inception in 1984, alongside Marcus Siepen (guitar since 1987) and Tomas Stauch (drums 1984-2005). This was also the first album featurning Oliver Holzwarth on bass guitar. Up until this album, Hansi had been the bassist as well as the vocalist, but with the vocal parts becoming increasingly ambitious he finally let go and embraced the role as a singing frontman. Holzwarth was never given full band status, and played with them as a permanent studio and live session musician for 13 years until 2011, after which he moved on to finally find full-time membership with the Italian symphonic metallers Rhapsody Of Fire.
The album took a while to complete, with sessions starting in July 1997 and lasting until January 1998. Far from the longest album sessions in history, but a new record for Blind Guardian, as they discovered that creating ambitious and less straightforward pieces of music can be quite the challenge.
For the Nightfall album the band was still figuring out a way to match their increasingly towering scope with a good process. Everybody still wrote individually, bringing parts rather than complete songs to the band. When the time came to get together to review what they had, anything could happen from combining parts, writing new parts as requred, using some ideas as springboards for yet new ideas. The first version of the album, with parts, ideas, and arrangements more or less in place, would pretty much be a working demo.
“As you know, we recorded [the album] in our studio with a 42-channel mixer,” Kürch said in an interview with the Italian journalist Luca Signorelli in 1998. “We brought in all our separate ideas on tape, then met and made the disc. This meant that the first version of the disc was pretty rough. The big part of the work came after.”
The “big part of the work” mention by Kürch indicates that the album was still far from done, in spite of having more or less complete song sketches. This is when the band start actual studio work, and the first part of studio work is always arriving at the final arrangements.
“For example, there is a ton of drums arrangements,” continues Kürch, “which we actually do AFTER entering the studio, pushing the final result towards a technically perfect but direct track. Andrè also did a huge job with the guitar orchestration, and I did the same for the vocals. After all of this work we ended up with a second version of the album, much clearer and easier to listen to. In short, we let the album grow from a tape with basic sounds into an entire orchestra, with the most powerful and exciting sound you can imagine!”
The album was released on 28 April 1998 to a universally positive reception. The musicianship was praised, as well as the combination of “furiously paced and extremely melodic” guitar parts. Kürch got particular praise for the incredible vocal layers and mind-blowing arrangements, with Sputnikmusic saying “In every aspect and mood, Blind Guardian delivers in the vocal department. Whether the song is amazingly fast and melodic, like Time Stands Still (At the Iron Hill) or whether the mood is somber and slow (The Eldar), you are sure to be hit in the face with a simply remarkable feat in terms of vocal achievement. One of the finest vocal performances I have ever seen on a metal album.”
The album got some attention from the Tolkien environment as well. It’s fair to say that their focus was more on the storytelling aspects than the music, as it’s safe to assume that most Tolkien scholars aren’t metalheads. The album was still regarded as having an interesting take on the story, and overall regarded as a well executed project. The Norwegian Tolkien society was treated to an in-depth analysis in their membership magazine courtesy of yours truly.
In the 2010 book Middle-Earth Minstrel: Essays on Music In Tolkien, edited by Bradford Lee Eden, Amy H. Sturgis writes that “although one can assume that Tolkien was not a headbanger,” she finds that in the opinion of her students, the “driving energy” of the power metal sound is appropriate for the stories: “The music conveys rage and despair, which fits lyrics such as ‘The doom of the Noldor drew near/ The words of a banished king, ‘I swear revenge!’’” Sturgis adds that this facilitates discussion of Tolkien’s Christian view of the fall of man.
It is worth mentioning that the album predates Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings-series by three years. This was a little too early for the Bards to ride on the Tolkien-wave of the early 2000s, but they may instead have had a small part in helping to create it, at least in the metal community. Indeed, in a 1999 interview, Hansi Kürch intimated that – owing largely to the praise which Nightfall in Middle-Earth had received within the wider Tolkien fandom – there was some serious deliberation as to whether Blind Guardian might be involved in soundtracking the films.
While this did not come to pass, Nightfall in Middle-Earth perhaps stands alone as a fully conceptual heavy metal album-length adaption of Tolkien worthy of attention. The instrumentation, and arrangement around a core of scene-setting spoken samples, make this Blind Guardian’s most ambitious venture yet – both musically and thematically.
Blind Guardian grew their fanbase with this album to such an extent that this was their first album to be released in the United States. The band’s ongoing sales eventually encouraged Century Media to release their entire back catalog in the US in 2007, as part of the international reissue program which saw all their albums remastered and re-released with bonus tracks.
Nightfall in Middle-Earth is widely regarded as one of Blind Guardian’s best-known and best-received albums in their discography.
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