The Trans-Siberian Orchestra is pretty unique band in the pantheon of metal. Starting as a side project for music producer Paul O'Neill, he worked with Savatage members Jon Oliva, Al Pitrelli, and Robert Kinkel on what was likely just going to be a one-off project. However, when the "Carol of the Bells" inspired track "Christmas Eve/Sarajevo 12/24" became a surprise hit from Savatage's Dead Winter Dead, they reused the track for their side project, making the album soar on the pop charts.
Now, after a handful of other albums, TSO is known for their epic arena rock shows and bombastic symphonic metal style. I can't help but wonder if they didn't help to galvanize the symphonic metal explosion of the late 90s into the 2000s. In any case, I was in the mood this holiday season to jam some of these albums, and I figured I might as well do a Retrospective article for them, reminiscing on the classics, and checking out on some of their newer releases that I hadn't gotten around to until now.
I don't know if it's possible for me to review this album objectively. I don't remember exactly when my dad brought this CD home (I was in middle-school, at least), but I know we played it constantly after we got it. Every Christmas this album came out; we played it home, we played in the car, and I never really got sick of it. It's one of the first metal albums that really came to love, thinking retroactively.
I think what has helped this album feel so timeless is it's excellent use of dynamics, giving the album a very cinematic quality. It's not afraid to drift from soft, almost sentimental, guitar pieces to outright heavy metal menace, and everything in between. It is a concept album, following a story about an angel tasked with finding some proper Christmas spirit in the world. However, it mostly sits in the background as the band reimagine many Christmas classics. Obvious stand outs include the "A Mad Russian's Christmas" which provides a metal spin on Tchaikovsky, "A Star to Follow" with the overlapping male voices singing in a round, the original track "First Snow," and of course "Sarajevo 12/24." The album is bookended by some excellent 80s anthemic cheese with "An Angel Came Down" and "An Angel Returned," and there some decent, if simple, acoustic guitar renditions of carols. However, the album has it's thematic core with the acoustic ballad "Old City Bar," where the angel finally finds that Christmas spirit he has been looking for.
I doubt my review of this album will change anyone's mind. You probably already know whether or not you like this kind of music, but I can't deny that it still holds a special place in my heart as one of the best Christmas albums ever recorded (and that's some stiff competition!). Thinking on it today, I do wonder if this album didn't help prepare me for the power metal I would later discover in college, as it is quite an epic album with great symphonic elements, genuine guitar shredding, and melodramatic vocals. At the very least, it's an album that still holds up to this day, and probably the band's best effort.
So after that resounding success, they naturally followed up with another Christmas album. This time, the concept mostly revolves around a girl finding some old letters in the attic that talk about Christmases past, and by exploring these memories comes to learn more about the holiday and what it can mean for her. While it's a solid follow up, I will say that it's not quite as strong as the debut.
All of the elements are back, of course. There's plenty of anthemic riffs and melodies, backed by a bombastic orchestra, ensuring all the emotional peaks and valleys. "Christmas Canon" was the big single this time, focusing on the children's choir style again. There is a stronger presence of blues and gospel, but the classical music still shows up to allow the guitarists to show off their fretwork. However, the real outlier is the very strange "The Three Kings and I," which tells the story of how someone's ancestor saved the Three Wise Men from the Nativity story from the evil King Herod. The song dips into more of a jazz groove, and includes a gospel-styled bridge. While the guitars are there, it is very different from the rest of the album, though still quite fun.
If there is one thing that this album does that the first doesn't, it's that The Christmas Attic is a much more emotional album, but I suppose that's to be expected with themes of memories and nostalgia. My favorite tracks include "The World That She Sees," "Found Our Way Home," "Appalachian Snowfall," and "Christmas in the Air." With power ballads are full of sentimentality, rearranged carols drawing upon an old Christmas spirit, and anthemic rockers to pick up the pace, this album does well to match the previous album, maintaining the qualities that the first one established.
After the success of the two Christmas albums, the band decided to branch out with a completely different topic for their third album, this time telling a bit of a new fable regarding Beethoven and his theoretical 10th symphony. While the music obviously shifts from Christmas carols to pieces of classical music for it's inspiration, it remains as theatrical as ever.
The story focuses on a fateful night when Beethoven is composing, when Fate and Twist show up to inform him of his looming death. Then Mephistopheles arrives, trying to trick Beethoven into handing over his life's work for the salvation of his soul. This leads him to review of his life to determine how things ended up this way, creating all kinds of opportunities to remake many of Beethoven's works as well as some of his contemporaries. It's a pretty typical Faustian legend, taking a few creative liberties with the composer's history to explore its subject, but the result is a solid rock opera, full of the melodramatic elements that TSO has now mastered at this point. The bombast starts right off with the "Overture," an carries through most of the rest of the album. Jon Oliva is definitely reveling his vocal performance of Mephistopheles, and Jody Ashworth makes for a perfectly curmudgeonly Beethoven, as he's wracked with his doubts and anxieties.
I will say that this album is probably not as strong as the first two. There are a few power ballads that drag things down a little, and some of the more narrative segments don't always make for great individual songs, but that's part of the rock opera style. However, there certainly some highlights, such as "Mephistopheles" where the tempter first shows up, "Mozart/Figaro," "Requiem (The Fifth)" and "A Last Illusion" with their fun interpretations of classics, and finally "Mephistopheles' Return" being my personal favorite as Beethoven starts feeling the pressure of his situation. Overall, it does a solid job of broaden the band beyond being just "that Christmas Metal band," while retaining their symphonic metal prowess.
Of course, they would go right back to the Christmas themes with their next album, completing what is now known as the Christmas Trilogy. I will admit that, outside of the excellent "Wizards in Winter," I haven't listened to this one as much as the other two, as I do think it is a little weaker than them. Still, it provides another hefty dose of Christmas charm and classical music interpretations.
Once again, it's a concept album. Featuring the angel from the other two holiday journeys, he is tasked once again to find some Christmas spirit in the world. While he does see many different examples (including a jazz club), the album then focuses on a single man who, when his wife died in pregnancy and the child suffered brain damage as a result, he gets angry with God, abandoning his faith in Christmas and putting the child up for adoption instead. Decades later, he is reminded of his son and decides to follow up on what became of him. He discovers that his son is working at that same hospital, taking care of newborn babies born to drug-afflicted mothers. This inspires the man to reconnect with his son and with Christmas as a whole. Satisfied, the angel observing all of this returns to heaven, successful in his mission. As usual, this is all just operatic drama for the music to hang on, which is pretty typical for the band at this point, at the risk of even becoming formulaic. All the trappings are here, and while it does capture the same sense of nostalgia the other albums do, it just doesn't feel as fresh this time around.
Still, this is by no means a bad album. There's plenty of anthemic rocking to be had as it meanders its way through the story. "Faith Noel" and "The Lost Christmas Eve" do a great job of bringing the listener back into its iconic atmosphere, the jazzy section in the middle breaks things up well, the melodramatic Broadway-style moments are as big and anthemic as they need to be, there's plenty of high quality fretwork on all those guitars, both electric and acoustic, and of course who can deny the excellence that is "Wizards in Winter," which has cemented itself into the pop culture canon for the holiday. It's just hard to follow up what were two already great albums, so this one not being quite on the same level is not a deal breaker as it wraps up the trilogy well enough.
So this will be the first of the albums that I had not listened to before starting this retrospective. I remember some folks making a big deal when it came out, but then it seemed to drop off right away. As for myself, I simply hadn't gotten around to it until this year. Unfortunately, despite some good music, I discovered that the album is mostly bloated, and narratively kind of a mess.
The concept this time really meanders about. Starting with a little girl discovering a strange but kind man building a sand castle on the beach, he tells a story that focuses on the man's friend and how, before he goes to fight in the Vietnam war, this friend stumbled across a strange castle with Erasmus inside, who gives the soldier some advice. Then the soldier goes to Cambodia and fights, only to be captured by the Khmer Rouge. As a prisoner, he is visited by a communist general, and as they talk, the general has an internal struggle about what he is doing, eventually deciding to help the solider, only to see him die of his wounds. So he goes on a quest to find the soldier's wife and child to beg for their forgiveness. He succeeds on meeting the child, as the stranger building the sand castle ends up being that general, and the child who discovers him is the soldier's daughter. It's definitely very convoluted, and a lot of comes from the liner notes in the album. With the other albums, one could piece together the story from just the music alone, but here, I can't imagine making sense of the thing without the pages of prose that accompany the music.
As for the music, it's a lot of the standard TSO tropes: plenty of classical music references, shredding guitar solos, and anthemic ballads featuring voices bellowing their messages in dramatic fashions. The album starts well with "Night Enchanted" making me think of Handel's Messiah, and "The Mountain" being a solid interpretation of Grieg's work. "Sparks" ends up being a curious little rocker, and the bonus track "Nutrocker" is just as fun. The classical music tracks are definitely the best part of the album, providing some fun, theatrical metal. The biggest problem are the anthems, as they tend to lean quite hard into power ballad territory, with two of them being over 9 minutes long! I understand that they're trying to provide these big, narrative moments, but I think in the desire to create a more fulfilling rock opera and fill out two CDs, they spread themselves too thin, and the album just feels padded. Despite a valiant effort in trying to expand their style and storytelling, the album ends up being a bit of a mixed bag for me.
While TSO have a lot of EPs and other releases, most of them end up being compilations or samplers of stuff from their Christmas Trilogy. As far as I can tell, this is the only EP that has original material on it. Once again, I had not heard this before I started this retrospective, and it seems this time it's just a handful of winter-themed songs without any kind of concept to tie them together beyond that.
It starts with a great pair of epic metal tracks, the title track being an adaptation of "Winter" by Vivaldi. Both are well done and will certainly find themselves in my playlists. However, the rest of the EP provides a handful of soft ballads, with "Someday" being very reminiscent of "Old City Bar." They're okay, but don't really quite have the heart that makes their classic ballads so strong. Still, it's a nice little collection of songs that feels like a post-script to their trio of Christmas epics.
And now we come to the end. As far as I can tell, despite being a full-length album, there isn't any kind of story or concept to this one. I think it's just meant to be a collection of shorter stories, with the idea that they are some of the letters Erasmus from Night Castle was sending out. Unfortunately, this means the songs need to stand on their own, and not many of them do.
Again, the TSO staples are here, with a handful of metal interpretations of classic music and a number of anthemic ballads, but it's starting to feel very by-the-numbers for the most part. If anything, it feels like the album is kind of incomplete, as if they came up with the songs, but then had to hurry through the production and didn't take the time to expand on them as one would expect. Even the lush symphonics are reduced to some very obvious synthesizer-based strings, making the songs seem cheap compared to the epicness that previous albums provided. Considering the tracks themselves, "Mountain Labyrinth," "King Rurik," and "Lullaby Night" are rather lifeless instrumentals, while "Stay," "Not the Same," and "Forget About the Blame" are some rather forgettable ballads (though they include a second version of that last track with Lzzy Hale from Halestorm singing, and it's probably the better of the two).
There are a few interesting sections, though, such as the interesting mood and tempo shifts in songs like "Prometheus," "Prince Igor" with the hammond organs, the strange "Not Dead Yet" that has Russell Allen of Symphony X fame not singing but doing more of a scat-singing thing, and the choir-driven "Who I Am." Other tracks of note are "The Night Conceives," which is a pretty standard rock song that's helped with an aggressive vocal performance from Kayla Reeves, and "Past Tomorrow," which has this haunting atmosphere that's pretty unique for the band, with Jennifer Cella's vocals being multi-tracked, giving it almost an Enya vibe. However, considering the album as a whole and comparing it to previous efforts, Letters from the Labyrinth definitely feels lackluster and underwhelming. I guess when a band sets the bar so high from the start, it makes the weaker efforts stand out all the more.
Well, that was a fun retrospective, even if the albums fizzled towards the end. The Trans-Siberian Orchestra have certainly established a legacy of excellent works and made themselves a staple of the growing symphonic metal genre (if not an innovator). While their later albums do lose a good chunk of the magic, the band still carries on, often doing tours focused on their Christmas material.
However, the brainchild of the project Paul O'Neill passed away in 2017, and it makes me wonder if there will ever be any new material from the band. Of course, his frequent co-writer Jon Oliva is still very much involved, as well as other regular contributors like Al Pitrelli and Chris Caffery, so it's certainly possible they could make a new album. If they do, I guarantee that I will review it!
In any case, I hope that was a nice Christmas surprise for folks. It's been a while since I did my last retrospective. I had forgotten how time-consuming they could be! There are others that I have been slowly working on, but they still seem quite a ways off. I need to be catching up on new releases anyway, so keep an eye out for those articles coming soon! Until then, rock on! \m/
