I think he meant that from a commercial point of view or for the power metal fans it would've been better if he'd made a solo album instead, but that's no knock on Unia, because he's often said it's his favorite Sonata record.
That makes sense. I just recall reading that somewhere, they've probably pulled a blabbermouth and took his words out of context.
But keep in mind that I wouldn't put so much, if any, power metal in a list, so that's already something
Right... have another power metal album then.
#41KarmaKamelotGenre: power metal2001 Kamelot is one of my favourite modern power metal acts out there. Their works got everything you can wish for this genre, be it catchy vocal melodies, neat guitar solos, keyboard and piano based ballads, perfect album flows, you name it. They tend to release consistently good records with rare exceptions and their run from 1999’s The Fourth Legacy until 2012’s Silverthorn is magnificent, the albums ranging from “that was fine except a few numbers” to “wow, this is some brilliance shining through”. Karma, in my opinion of course, belongs to the latter category.
Kamelot is an American band officially founded in 1991 by
Thomas Youngblood (guitars, backing vocals) and
Mark Vanderbilt (lead vocals). The latter left the band after the first two albums, and in 1998 the band has hired another vocalist,
Roy Khan, who provided vocals for seven Kamelot’s studio albums, became quite an integral part of the band and an important piece in their commercial success. Roy Khan left the band in 2011 and was replaced by
Tommy Karevik though, which spawned a lot of pleading comments in the vein of “Roy please come back!!” and also the insulting ones like “The new vocalist is shit and can’t sing, Roy was loads better please come back!”. Oh, well. Anyway, another musician who joined the band with Roy was a drummer,
Casey Grillo; bass guitar on Karma was played by
Glenn Barry, and there are also keyboards and orchestral arrangements by
Miro, additional guitars by
Sascha Paeth and the string quartet with two violins, cello and viola present on the album.
Karma consists of a number of concise, short tracks, each is about four or five minutes in length. Driven by guitar riffs and noticeable, powerful and versatile Roy’s voice, the album offers a bunch of impressive tunes, each one is memorable as hell and will probably be stuck in your head, be it the slightly annoying melody of
Forever (based on Solveig’s Song by Edward Grieg) or more slow and calm chorus of
Temples of Gold. In fact, the fantastic songwriting is the thing which distinguishes the great Kamelot albums from the not-so-great ones (duh, obviously), and loads of it can be seen on Karma, in every song if you ask me. There is even a kind of epic closing the album, called
Elizabeth. I wrote “kind of” because it’s actually split in three parts on the CD and the parts are clearly different, but the lyrical themes and few melodies are linked, so whatever.
If you’re looking for a wonderful power metal record with almost no progressive elements, Karma is a worthy pick. The Fourth Legacy, previous Kamelot album, was nice, but Karma is loads better; after it, the band began adding more weird elements, so that’s why I think Karma is an optimal pick for someone who wants to get into power metal driven Kamelot. Progressive Kamelot though, that’s the whole another story here.
Favourite tracks:
Forever,
Wings Of Despair,
Karma,
Temples Of Gold,
Elizabeth, pt. I, II, IIINow that we're ten albums through, what do you think about the pace? Should I speed the whole thing up, slow it down or it's fine as it's going now?