20. March of Mephisto (from The Black Halo)
19. Epilogue (bonus track from The Black Halo
18. Silent Goddess (from The Fourth Legacy)
17. Moonlight (from The Black Halo)
16. Silence of the Darkness (from Ghost Opera)
15. Hunter’s Season (from Poetry for the Poisoned))
This song is conflicting to me. On one hand, it has one of the best choruses, best verses, and best lyrics of all Kamelot songs. On the other hand, it has a horrifically mood-killing wankfest of a solo courtesy of guest guitarist Gus G. In the end, it gets slot #15, which, although among prestigious company, is a solid 10+ slots lower than it could have been.
There are a lot of things I love about this song. I love that the intro doesn’t feel it has to be all power metally (which it could’ve easily been) by overdoing the double bass. I love the syncopation in the verses. I love Khan’s vocal performance. This song has a number of great things that work really well together; it’s another case of lyrics/music feeding off each other. The orchestration on this song is absolutely phenomenal; one of my favourite arrangements in all of Kamelot’s discography, and that’s saying a lot. Of course, even though the vast majority of the song works together wonderfully, the guitar solo is so distractingly awful it absolutely kills the momentum of the song. Kamelot typically utilizes tasteful, and failing that (re: “Descent of the Archangel”), good guest performances, but this is just scraping the bottom of the barrel. It kills a song that manages to perfectly capture a mood. Seeing as how I don’t know anything more about the composition of the song, I can’t comment on it any more deeply (I don’t know, for example, if the same, jarring, backing riff would’ve been there if there had been no guest performer) but I’d go as far to say as this is the single worst Kamelot moment since their first two albums (beating even those cursed post-chorus melodies on “The Shadow of Uther”). It’s a shame it happened to occur on an otherwise phenomenal song.
14. On the Coldest Winter Night (from Epica)
13. Elizabeth (from Karma)
12. Ghost Opera (from Ghost Opera)
11. The Black Halo (from The Black Halo)