Trans-Siberian Orchestra – Night Castle (UK Edition)

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Now well-known worldwide, Trans-Siberian Orchestra is an orchestra-meets-metal project from guitarist and producer Paul O’Neill with the involvement of scores of musicians, most famously including ex-members of Savatage. Double album Night Castle is the first TSO album to get a full commercial release in the UK and as such it has been treated to a special edition release including two exclusive live bonus tracks, ahead of their first ever European tour. The album itself doesn’t seem to live up to TSO’s lofty reputation. Rather than feeling like a continuous concept piece as it should, too many of the tracks fade out and feel unconnected and many of the metal passages, rather than sounding like clever interpretations of classical score, are often just simple melodic metal tracks with basic riffs and not much in the way of solos. Most of the heavier tracks have vocal melodies that have very clearly come from the pen of Jon Oliva (because they bear more than a passing similarity to his own on the Jon Oliva’s Pain records) and almost exclusively fall to Jeff Scott Soto to try his best with. They’re not really suited to him and almost all sound like Jon Oliva trying to rewrite Bohemian Rhapsody. On the classical side there’s very little to report. Many songs have little-to-no orchestral involvement at all (keyboards or piano making up the difference), and some, when they do, use far too much lifted from well-known classical pieces (listen to The Mountain, Mozart And Memories, Toccata – Carpimus Noctem and Night Enchanted for instantly recognisable motifs). There are some fantastic performances to be heard along the way, in particular vocalist Rob Evan on There Was A Life and on the magnificent epic Epiphany, but very little stands out on what is an over-long album with too many similar sounding tracks. It quickly becomes background music. And as one final massive insult to the members of Savatage, the bonus track cover of Believe is credited to Paul O’Neill alone. This was the case on the 2009 US release and hasn’t been rectified.

Written by Andy Lye
More: 2011, Albums, Heavy Metal, Quick.Play Reviews, Symphonic, Trans-Siberian Orchestra