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SentineLEX
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SentineLEX
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 Posted: Thu Sep 13, 2018 8:39 pm Post subject: Re: I listened to the two Keeper of the Seven Keys albums |
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| Empathica1928 wrote: |
| SentineLEX wrote: |
| And found out where Tolkki got his ideas for the first 3 albums. Not to mention all the key references throughout the discography. |
Hot take, I don't think the Keeper albums are good or even noteworthy albums, and I'll take Twilight Time and Dreamspace over them NO CONTEST. I think the albums were definitely influenced by them, but I don't actually hear a lot of it in those songs. There's a sophistication even on Twilight Time that I don't hear in the Keepers at all. Just my opinion though. |
I would actually assert the opposite. To take a specific example, I think a lot of the themes in Madness Strikes at Midnight, The Hills Have Eyes, and Dreamspace (the song) are hidden under the water in Halloween from Keepers 1. I could agree that relative to length, Dreamspace is a pretty complex and sophisticated song that exceeds what Helloween did in Halloween. But Hills and especially Madness sounds very stilted and like Tolkki wanted to make that same sort of progressive song but without the experience or intuition on how to do it.
Maybe I could just be connecting lines that don't exist, but given it's a pretty self-derivative genre (not that that's a bad thing, it's like a classic archetypal story that gets retold thousands of times over the years, and each with their own twist), that Strato had explicitly tried to sound like Black Sabbath in the past, and Helloween was on a downswing in their career - consider how many Nightwish clones have sprung up ever since they started getting a little stale lately - it doesn't seem unlikely to me that a band that hadn't found a successful identity yet would try to copy one of the greats, maybe unintentionally.
The Keeper albums are definitely noteworthy if only because everyone covers I Want Out all the time, but I'm tempted to agree that they don't hold up too well in current year. Especially compared to what they did ~10 years later, or 7 Sinners. Not bad, but not great. |
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HinatAArcticA
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ZenithMC
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| Posted: Fri Sep 21, 2018 12:09 pm Post subject: Re: I listened to the two Keeper of the Seven Keys albums |
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| SentineLEX wrote: |
| I would actually assert the opposite. To take a specific example, I think a lot of the themes in Madness Strikes at Midnight, The Hills Have Eyes, and Dreamspace (the song) are hidden under the water in Halloween from Keepers 1. I could agree that relative to length, Dreamspace is a pretty complex and sophisticated song that exceeds what Helloween did in Halloween. But Hills and especially Madness sounds very stilted and like Tolkki wanted to make that same sort of progressive song but without the experience or intuition on how to do it. |
The closest that early Stratovarius came to sounding like Helloween in a musical context was probably We Are the Future. The bridge after the solo in particular wouldn't sound out of place on the Keepers albums. In fact, it sounds somewhat like a combination of the bridge from March of Time, rhythmically, with the verses and/or pre-choruses from Eagle Fly Free, melodically. The former of which's chorus is reminiscent of Learning to Fly's melody to boot. The Hands of Time's pre-chorus sounds similar to I'm Alive's pre-chorus as well. There are quite a number of parallels to be found between those bands.
As far as similarities to other bands go, In the Eyes of the World reminds me of an early Yngwie Malmsteen song (You Don't Remember, I'll Never Forget).
Darkness (my favorite song from Fright Night) sounds like the archetype for The Hills Have Eyes. Darkness has great atmosphere, however, Hills is a huge improvement over Darkness in almost every aspect. The intro and riff that follows is incredible and, ironically, much darker than Darkness. The real similarities between the two are apparent in the way that verses are structured. Madness Strikes at Midnight is much more jarring in its segue between the creepy dark intro and electrifying solo section, or lack thereof. I agree with you that there could have been a better way of solidifying those two segments. The creepiness does make a brief return at the very end of the song. I wouldn't consider Madness to be an atypically structured song apart from the intro. Dreamspace is a completely separate entity from the other songs I mentioned because it doesn't really follow the same structure as them. It is indeed a rather impressive composition. I'd go into further detail but it would probably belong in its own respective thread.
As far as similarities to other music in general go, certain chord progressions are, by far, more common than others. The circle of fifths (choruses of Hunting High and Low, Eagleheart, and Few Are Those come very close) and canon (chorus of We Are the Future) progressions are quite common in choruses and there are sure to be collisions between other artists when they are employed. |
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SentineLEX
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| Posted: Fri Sep 21, 2018 5:19 pm Post subject: Re: I listened to the two Keeper of the Seven Keys albums |
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| ZenithMC wrote: |
| SentineLEX wrote: |
| I would actually assert the opposite. To take a specific example, I think a lot of the themes in Madness Strikes at Midnight, The Hills Have Eyes, and Dreamspace (the song) are hidden under the water in Halloween from Keepers 1. I could agree that relative to length, Dreamspace is a pretty complex and sophisticated song that exceeds what Helloween did in Halloween. But Hills and especially Madness sounds very stilted and like Tolkki wanted to make that same sort of progressive song but without the experience or intuition on how to do it. |
The closest that early Stratovarius came to sounding like Helloween in a musical context was probably We Are the Future. The bridge after the solo in particular wouldn't sound out of place on the Keepers albums. In fact, it sounds somewhat like a combination of the bridge from March of Time, rhythmically, with the verses and/or pre-choruses from Eagle Fly Free, melodically. The former of which's chorus is reminiscent of Learning to Fly's melody to boot. The Hands of Time's pre-chorus sounds similar to I'm Alive's pre-chorus as well. There are quite a number of parallels to be found between those bands.
As far as similarities to other bands go, In the Eyes of the World reminds me of an early Yngwie Malmsteen song (You Don't Remember, I'll Never Forget).
Darkness (my favorite song from Fright Night) sounds like the archetype for The Hills Have Eyes. Darkness has great atmosphere, however, Hills is a huge improvement over Darkness in almost every aspect. The intro and riff that follows is incredible and, ironically, much darker than Darkness. The real similarities between the two are apparent in the way that verses are structured. Madness Strikes at Midnight is much more jarring in its segue between the creepy dark intro and electrifying solo section, or lack thereof. I agree with you that there could have been a better way of solidifying those two segments. The creepiness does make a brief return at the very end of the song. I wouldn't consider Madness to be an atypically structured song apart from the intro. Dreamspace is a completely separate entity from the other songs I mentioned because it doesn't really follow the same structure as them. It is indeed a rather impressive composition. I'd go into further detail but it would probably belong in its own respective thread.
As far as similarities to other music in general go, certain chord progressions are, by far, more common than others. The circle of fifths (choruses of Hunting High and Low, Eagleheart, and Few Are Those come very close) and canon (chorus of We Are the Future) progressions are quite common in choruses and there are sure to be collisions between other artists when they are employed. |
I detected something familiar in Eagle Fly Free that I couldn't put my finger on. You might be right. But I don't think it's purely a chord progression thing. Power metal is a genre where you'll hear the same chord progression used a lot on separate songs, even by the same artists. But I'd have to pin it to atmosphere or motif or something else that's less obvious. When I semi-seriously joke that Eagleheart is a discount version of Hunting High and Low, I think the differences in chord progression (and change in key) is one of the things that supports that comparison, and it's pretty blatant if you hear one immediately after the other. But with regards to Stratovarius's early work, it almost seems to suggest Helloween or another band more if heard separately, so you have time to get one song out of your head before listening to the other one.
I'd love to hear your extended take on Dreamspace, either in this thread or outside of it. |
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ZenithMC
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Joined: 21 Sep 2018
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| Posted: Sat Sep 22, 2018 12:19 am Post subject: Re: I listened to the two Keeper of the Seven Keys albums |
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| SentineLEX wrote: |
| I detected something familiar in Eagle Fly Free that I couldn't put my finger on. You might be right. But I don't think it's purely a chord progression thing. Power metal is a genre where you'll hear the same chord progression used a lot on separate songs, even by the same artists. But I'd have to pin it to atmosphere or motif or something else that's less obvious. When I semi-seriously joke that Eagleheart is a discount version of Hunting High and Low, I think the differences in chord progression (and change in key) is one of the things that supports that comparison, and it's pretty blatant if you hear one immediately after the other. But with regards to Stratovarius's early work, it almost seems to suggest Helloween or another band more if heard separately, so you have time to get one song out of your head before listening to the other one. |
Differences in melody, chord progression, instrumentation/timbre, time signatures, key signatures, and tempo are all variables that affect the outcome of a song, and its similarities to other songs. The most important of these variables are melody and timbre. These two are special in that even if the chord progression is a 1:1 copy of another song's chord progression, melodic differences can completely and radically affect the sound/feel of the song (also usually the most memorable parts of a song), and different timbres (differences between vocalists, subtleties between guitarists, keyboardists, bassists, drummers, etc.) produce a similar effect as well. Once you start playing around with different time signatures, it will really start to sound unique compared to others.
In terms of what I do to sound unique, I tend to use extended chords relatively frequently in my power metal compositions. The reasons of which are simple. They sound cool to me.
| SentineLEX wrote: |
| I'd love to hear your extended take on Dreamspace, either in this thread or outside of it. |
With Dreamspace, Tolkki pulled off something really unique when compared to the rest of Stratovarius' discography. Dreamspace is structured in medley/potpourri form.
For instance, most songs follow some variation of verse-chorus form:
| Code: |
Intro => Verse => Chorus => Verse => Chorus => (Bridge) => Chorus => Outro
A B C B/B1 C D C E/A |
Whereas Dreamspace is structured as follows:
| Code: |
Intro => Tranquil-Verse => Tense-Verse => Build-Up => Eerie/Release => Eerie-Verse => Riff => Outro
A B C D E F G H
0:00 1:10 1:39 2:07 2:25 3:28 3:59 5:10 |
G is very strongly correlated between musical ideas so much so that I ended up lumping it all into one section.
If I broke up G into separate sections, it would be the sole point in the song with repetitions.
There exists a correlation between sections E and F as well.
The chorus is entirely absent, but it doesn't sound structurally deficient because the atmosphere is the deepest, darkest, and thickest of any song I've ever heard. Tension is built in two places: from C to D, released in E; throughout G, released in H. The intensity of which could be argued to be a substitute for a traditional chorus' energy, almost like a pseudo-chorus. An energy boost via a solo section doesn't feel necessary due to the atmosphere/tension as well. Excellence in melody, atmosphere, and production are truly the cohesive bond that holds this masterpiece together. |
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Wow! 