They had stripped their ideas down to basics from their overwrought if joyously ambitious debut and slowly over the course of a decade steadily built them back up again. By the time they recorded Nightfall in Middle-Earth, they had already written a full thrash concept record with Imaginations from the Otherside, released one of the most compelling live metal records of the early 1990s in Tokyo Tales, and tackled Tolkienian subject matter in, well… every record they’d released up to that point.
Their first few records featured a strange, but at times powerful mixture of amateurish performances jutted up against heady progressive arrangements, thrash metal syncopation and tension, and traditional heavy metal’s grandiosity and conceptual aims. But for those of the mind, these details make it that much richer.īlind Guardian embraced metal as a whole at the time of their birth. It isn’t necessary to know the band’s full body of work or broader historical or genre context of the record to enjoy Nightfall, a record that easily, transparently, and endlessly gives up its treasures even on the first listen. It is a streak they’ve kept alive since, delivering a consistently stellar set of progressive metal records that feel thankfully devoid of trite cliches like aimless song structures, discoherent riff salad, and pseudo-philosophical musings. Nightfall in Middle-Earth represents the apex of the band's sound, the moment when all of the pieces they had spent their career up till that point finally were honed to perfection and assembled into an unimpeachable whole. Blind Guardian manage bridge this divide, one of a few bands the likes of Pharaoh, Manowar, and Helloween who manage to do so, combining elements of thrash metal and traditional heavy metal, as well as integrating harsher raspy and screamed vocals into their sound. There is a general divide in metal fandom between power metal fans and extreme metal fans, one which can be optimistically interpreted as a sign of the breadth of metal in the contemporary world.
Blind Guardian’s seminal progressive power metal record Nightfall in Middle-Earth turns 20 today.
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