DEMONS & WIZARDS

Hansi Kursch and Jon Schaffer are the last Gunslingers of a musical world that has moved on. Roughly in those terms, paraphrasing the blurb for Stephen King's "The Dark Tower," one could describe the second effort from this transatlantic collaboration. An initial listen to "Touched By The Crimson King" evokes a feeling of mild fatigue -- the debut was, after all, more hook-laden and original. The chorus of the album opener "Crimson King" could have been juicier (here it's worth recalling "Heaven Denies" -- the thermonuclear opener from the first record), "Seize The Day" in its acoustic passages shamelessly resembles the overplayed "Hotel California," and "The Gunslinger" is as broken and twisted as the ribs of a novice mountain biker. And although there were already plenty of acoustic passages on "Demons & Wizards," "Touched By The Crimson King" is simply overflowing with ballad interludes and even fully unplugged compositions. When you listen to the disc a second and third time, you stop noticing the minor inconsistencies -- your ear grows accustomed to the rough musical landscape, and even the aforementioned "Crimson King" chorus begins to caress the ear in a Blind Guardian-esque fashion. But even despite all the shortcomings, the album is definitively head and shoulders above most of today's releases in the power genre. The recognizable ICED EARTH-Schaffer rhythm guitars and Hansi's vocals -- growing ever more refined with each passing year -- thanks to the signature style forged half a decade ago, DEMONS & WIZARDS are hard to confuse with anyone else. It's gratifying to see heavier tracks, such as "Terror Train." To some extent, such moments existed before (for instance, in "My Last Sunrise": "Golgotha, saw nothing but a carpenter's death..."), yet in combination with the image of King's murderous train, the track sounds incomparably harsher: "My name is Blaine. I am your pain..." Continuing on the subject of lyrics, besides "The Dark Tower," "Touched By The Crimson King" contains traces of L. Frank Baum's "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz" ("Wicked Witch"), Melville's "Moby Dick" ("Beneath These Waves"), and Oscar Wilde's "The Picture of Dorian Gray" ("Dorian"). The album closes with a cover of LED ZEPPELIN's "Immigrant Song."