Review by Rexorcist for Ayreon - Into the Electric Castle: A Space Opera (1998)

So apparently the original version of Actual Fantasy is practically impossible to find, so I skipped it.  Real shame since I wanted to critique as many Ayreon albums as I could.  I was only able to find the first two tracks, and was really NOT impressed with what I heard.  It was too long and drawn out, going for bad imitations of classic space rock.  So the next album on my Ayreon marathon is Into the Electric Castle, which some say is their best thus far.

This wacky-ass album cover alone gives you everything you need to know.  Why wouldn't a somewhat psychedelic journey through an undiscovered world to an ancient castle be described with an Infected-Mushroom take on Howls' Moving Castle?  This album features multiple characters all voicing different characters within this strange little story, so it's already proving that it's a unique album, which I didn't really grasp from The Final Experiment.  The vocalists include Lucassen himself, Anneke van Giersbergen of The Gathering, Fish of Marillion, Sharon den Adel and Robert Westerholt from Within Temptation and even Peter Daltrey from the classic pop band Kaleidoscope.   You can tell from the first song, Isis and Osiris, that some 60's influences such as psych rock and Jethro Tull are making their way in.  There's some fine instrumentation from Isis and Osiris alone, but the real strength is how well all the vocalists operate with each other as well as with this unique new sound for Ayreon.

I found that there were some moments where I wished the metal of the first album would make more appearances early on, and I didn't get very much between Amazing Flight and Valley of the Queens (tracks 3-9).  Eventually, once I got past the halfway mark, I kind of gave up on the idea that this is a metal album as was advertised.  However, I really enjoyed the story and the unique sound was there to help.  We had little bits of metal every now and then, like the power ballad The Castle Hall, which mingled the power metal sound with Jethro Tull acoustics.  Weirdly enough, it becomes a metal album again at around track ten.

I didn't think about this at first when I turned on the album, but I wasn't surprised at all when I heard the ten-minute epics and they kept the songs original and consistent throughout each runtime.  This means their skill at delivering epics from their debut hadn't waned at all at that point.  Unfortunately, there aren't very many epics after the first two actual songs, but it was still a lot of fun.

So the four questions:

1. What is the goal of the album?  To be a new kind of rock opera for Ayreon.

2. Did the album meet its goal?  Totally.  This is a much cooler and more thought-provoking story than The Final Experiment.

3. What did the band sacrifice or neglect to meet this goal?  Well, they sacrificed their original sound for a new one, and the instrumentations don't wow me as much as they impress me.

4. Were these negligences made up for by other aspects of the album?  The instrumentation was more great than amazing, so there's a no for that at least.  But there's a HUGE yes for the shift in sound because A: it's not as typical as the stereotypical medieval vibes of The Final Experiment, and B: because this retro Jethro Tull influence paired beautifully with the lyrical content.

So I'd say that this tertiary album of Ayreon's is a big success for them.  It features many cool prog songs with a strong presence, rarely gets samey, carries a bunch of vocalists that work together perfectly and always keeps the story strong.  Really glad I decided to check these guys out.