Even the rocks will know by now that Demons & Wizards are the side project band of Hansi Kursch and Jon Schaffer, two very popular characters thanks to the work done the former as singer of Blind Guardian and the latter as leader of Iced Earth. It's long time that the most different rumors have been moving round about this project of theirs: Hansi and Jon have never hidden their feelings of mutual sympathy and started writing something in common already in 1997. Their duties with the respective original bands, kissed by a very great success of audience and critics everywhere in the world, have then lessened the process of gestation of this album excessively, work that only after about three years from the composition of the first song has been finally finished. A long and enervating wait then for the very several headbangers of the planet, but even a wait that has been paid back very well by a work that does not disappoint our expectations confirming again the huge songwriting skills of Hansi and Jon: though not reaching the level of the fantastic "Nightfall in Middle Earth" nor anyway the one of the excellent "Something Wicked This Way Comes", the work of Demons & Wizards reveals from the first listening to be better than any other album of the genre released in 1999 (with the one exception of "The House of Atreus" by Virgin Steele). Demons & Wizards does not strays much from what Hansi and Jon have already been able to make us listen in the past and in particular it's Iced Earth of the U.S. guitar player that are recalled the most from the stylistical point of view. Various songs are all much simple, without particular technicalities and complex harmonic woofs, characterized by an easy structure and by almost essential rhythmical arrangements in which the fast tercets by Schaffer and the flashes of double bass drums of Prator's drumkit strike for their scarny immediacy. But one mustn't believe that this expressive minimalism translates into thinness and insubstantiality, on the contrary the simplicity of instrumental section allows Hansi's very refined voice to rise in all its natural beauty. The key to understand this work must then be found in the performance of the German singer, impronted not on the concept of sound assault (as the essentiality of the songs could make believe), but on the contrary on the search for telling atmospheres. In the albums are in fact present many references about the subject of "narration" so loved by Blind Guardian, from the cover (that someway recalls the artwork of "Somewhere far Beyond") to many lyrics (among which it appears the final trilogy inspired to the legend of the gnome Azrael and the creation of the world); it is as if for once the bard Hansi had prefered using a less complex (but not less effective) structure to tell his stories and to enchant his listeners. In line with the conceptual nature of the album the quiet and reflexive atmospheres prevail evidently over the epic/warring ones and even the most energic tracks present some crepuscular and suffering melodies that anaesthetize the rawness of the rhythmical section. An album then that encloses together the adrenalinic charge of Iced Earth and the bigger expressive maturity of Blind Guardian effectively: I don't think you need further words to run to your favourite CD seller…
Fulvio "Araya"
Hansi Kursch (vc)
Jon Schaffer (gt)
Jim Morris (gt)
Mark Prater (dr)
Blind Guardian - Nightfall in middle earth
