Germany's Blind Guardian is my favorite pure power metal band, although I've got a couple bands higher up my list who owe a lot to the genre. I first came across them relatively late in their career, when they were already well-established as one of the most pioneering and influential power metal bands around. It was a genre that I had almost no exposure to at that time in 2001, and my introduction to them opened the door to a whole new spectrum of bands I previously had no idea about.
Jennifer and I had recently moved to Germany and were playing in a joint concert with a regional band from the Trier area. The musicians in the group were all pretty young, and I hit it off with one of the trombonists who was also a metal enthusiast and just a really nice guy named Timo Becker. During some rehearsal, I was lamenting the demise of heavy music as I did a lot in those years. Timo gave me a kind of confused look and politely asked me what the hell I was talking about. He then launched into a dissertation on the merits of modern metal, paying particular attention to the still-thriving tradition of power metal in Germany. The next rehearsal, he presented me with a mixed CD of all German metal, and all (at that time) recorded in the previous few years. The first (and best) on the compilation was Blind Guardian.
I eventually got all of Blind Guardian's albums (I think I'm a few behind now though), and my favorite was the concept album, Nightfall In Middle-Earth, based on J.R.R. Tolkien's The Silmarillion. The album is densely orchestrated, with lots of choral backing vocals, as you'll hear below. After a spoken introduction, "Into the Storm" is the first track on the album. It was also the first song by Blind Guardian that I ever heard. What an excellent introduction.
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