The GB Album Club 015 - The Black Halo by Kamelot

Duders! Welcome to a new round of The Unofficial Giant Bomb Album Club! Last week, we sung disquieting odes to our favorite sex toys with For Your Pleasure by Roxy Music and you completely get the context of that statement and there's no need to explain it whatsoever. This week, we crank up the metal, the Faust, and, because the Spotify version comes with two radio cuts, the curiosity about whether metal radio was actually a thing with The Black Halo by Kamelot! This is the second pick from our good friend @facelessvixen, and you can listen with the links below:

Spotify

Apple Music

Youtube

Here at the Unofficial Giant Bomb Album Club, we made ourselves a pool of albums and we pick one a week at random to listen to and discuss. To participate, all you gotta do is listen to the album and comment below! But if you want to talk even more music stuff with your fellow Giant Bomb community members, join our Discord! It's where people go to have wrong opinions about Backxwash. (I kid, members I'm talking about! I'm doing the thing where I bring up a specific discussion to convey that we talk about music in there.) It's also where you gotta be if you want to be in on the next cycle of album selections, as this cycle will be ending the week before Christmas. So if you want to submit some pop or a metal subgenre or Backxwash next cycle, come on down!

Like the other album that I could have forced you all to listen to, The Autumn Effect by 10 years, The Black Halo is another album that I listened to pretty often during my teenage years, specifically my senior year of high school in 2007 when YouTube was becoming a thing and I spotted a Devil May Cry 3 video of some performing various high-level combos as Dante and Vergil and When The Lights Are Down was used as the background music. This album along with two of Kamelot's previous albums, Epica and Karma, along with Once, Dark Passion Play, and a little bit of Wishmaster by Nightwish were in rotation during my formative years of metal before getting into more extreme/heavier genres with Chuck Schuldiner, Michael Keene and Christian Münzner. Not that I was necessarily going for accessibility by switching my second album pick from, originally, Violence Unimagined by Cannibal Corpse to The Autumn Effect, and eventually switching again, last week, to The Black Halo, unlike the nu-metal and metalcore groups that I listened to during the mid and late 2000's, I figure that Kamelot is a both a lot less challenging and a less cringe band to listen to, so I'm hoping that this is a decent compromise between taking it easy on the group, but still going with an album that I still give a shit about.

This is one of those albums where I rarely listened to the actual album. For me, it was all about the One Cold Winter's Night concert. Hell of a show, and the songs felt more raw and lively.

In fact, I wound up covering Karma from that very show since I gravitate more towards Kamelot's earlier albums. Khan's performance here is something else.

Wow.

There was a while there where it seemed like few power metal bands were going release-over-release and having them turn out good quite like Kamelot was with that run from Karma to Ghost Opera huh. Its easy to see how they exploded in fame right around that time as well, because it seemed like the band really found their shtick in being the classy-goth kid's power metal band during Epica and The Black Halo. Even to this day it feels like the blueprint for the band was laid out during that album and even though the lineup has shifted tremendously since - new bassist, drummer, vocalist in that time - they still know that The Black Halo was where their bread was buttered. What an album though, even as a dork who has spent most of their time in the heavier underground, I always have time for Kamelot's brand of red-wine drinking goofiness. Almost every song on this album is great and has stuck with me for the decade and a half since its release, the only ones that don't immediately come to mind on this one for me are the interstitial concept tracks and "This Pain" but everything else?

"Serenade" is an amazing closer. "Moonlight", "The Black Halo" and "Abandoned" are all great. The first four? Thats as frontloaded as a disc can get. Having Dimmu Borgir's vocalist pop up in "March Of Mephisto" only laid the groundwork for the band to try it again with Bjorn from Soilwork on Poetry For The Poisoned, and even after that they've made major usage of the light/heavy interplay dynamic. I still have the One Cold Winter's Night dvd lying around somewhere as well and I've only seen the band once, during the Silverthorn touring cycle and that involved making a trip to the Bay Area.

All that said, I do think Ghost Opera is a fun as hell album as well even if its conceptual ideas are a little more scattershot. It has another fantastic closer in "Eden Echo" though.

Metal album #3 in my metal journey (#4 if you count PassCode) initiated by my joining this club!

Thanks to the metal albums we've done so far, plus some of the tracks that have been posted in the Discord, I'm getting a better sense of when I don't like an album because it fails for me on its own merits vs. when an album fails for me because of me being a dumbass. Case in point: Where Owls Know My Name didn't work for me because I thought some of its creative choices undercut what I think that album is trying to accomplish, but on the other hand, my lack of enjoyment of the Vildhjarta album was entirely my fault. I have difficulty enjoying super technical music because in my dumb brain, the function swallows the form, and despite the clear level of talent and artistry on display, to me, it painted too inside the lines. I respect the shit out of it intellectually, and I recognize that on some "objective" level, it's great. But I didn't feel anything.

Of course, this kind of binary isn't the right way to think about art, and again, I'm a metal newbie who doesn't know what I'm talking about. (Notice the thing that's missing from said binary is what I do like, and I haven't quite found that yet.) The point is that I think I'm developing... not exactly a taste for metal, but something adjacent to taste. Or at the very least, some sort of standard for what I want. Or at least I thought I was, because for me, this album fell right in the middle of the binary.

For me, it has to do with aesthetics. The words the band picks for their lyrics. What the lead singer does with his voice. The way its structured and presented. I get that there's a narrative, but there's a difference between presenting a narrative and stepping into theatricality, and to me, this album's a little too dramaturgical. Like it's a metal stage show as opposed to a genuine expression of metal. Setting aside the obvious problem of me not knowing what I'm talking about, the problem for me is that the theatricality detracts from the impact.

Then I realized something: I want impact. I may not have a clear understanding of what I want from metal yet, but this album made me realize I want something. To no longer just accept metal, but to actually like it, because The Black Halo has only cemented the idea that there's metal out there for me and I just have to keep looking.

So no, I didn't like The Black Halo. But I'm glad I listened to it because at some point in this album, my thoughts went from "There's metal out there somewhere for me" to "Goddamn it, I will find that metal if it fucking kills me." I realize that's a backhanded compliment, but it's a big step for me. My search for metal has just shifted from passive to active.

FAVORITE SONGS: "March of Mephisto," "Moonlight," "The Black Halo"

This was one of my formative albums, if I'm being honest. I don't know if I still love this album now, some 16 years later, but if it hadn't been for kamelot I probably wouldn't have bonded so well with my best friend.

I definitly think the One Cold Winter's Night renditions of the tracks from The Black Halo are better than their album counterparts, but standalone it's a pretty decent album. It tells the second part of the Faustus story quite well, and has some memorable riffs (March of Mephisto).

Favourite track: Serenade, but I couldn't really tell you why if you asked me.

Funny you should make that comparison - the framing device for Epica and The Black Halo is the story being told throughout the albums is actually a version of Faustus performed theatrically at a New Year celebration. The actors thank the audience at the end of the last track.

@unclejam23: Well, you're gonna have to do it without me since I'm not interested in cock and ball torture.

This one surprised me a bit. I wasn't expecting the theatricality of it. It reminds me a bit of Dio for some reason, particularly his Black Sabbath years. Unfortunately, I was listening to it while I was playing video games, so I didn't really LISTENto it. I need to give it another run when it isn't just background music to really decide if it is something I like or not.

@facelessvixen: I don't know what this means, but on behalf of the crushy community, the community of cock and ball torture lovers, I'd appreciate it if you didn't shame us in public like this.

I thought it was about the band and their Egoleech album from '04.

I've given it another shot, and I declare that this album... isn't bad? I don't mean to insult anyone, but some of the songs give me a bit of an Avenged Sevenfold vibe. There is also a strange feeling that some of these songs remind me of Castlevania games (particularly Abandoned). I don't know that I would seek this out, but I get how people could be into this. If I had to pick a favorite, it was probably Memento Mori, but I enjoyed the guitar on This Pain quite a bit.

Surprisingly, my first listen flew by. I think I prefer this kind of theatrical metal. Structurally, it's not trying to showboat and it sounds like something written by general-purpose nerds, rather than metal nerds.

Can't pick a favourite track out but there was no point where I was wanting to skip any either. It melds together pretty well, even if I'm not committing much to memory.

So I've given it the weekend to think about whether I really am done with the club or not... and yeah, I'm pretty sure I'm making the right move. The short version is that I don't fit in with the group for reasons that are more than just my taste in music and that I'm better off looking for new albums to listen to by other means.

...But here's the long version for context:

No, I'm not bailing and making a thing out of it just because Jam didn't like Kamelot. I know that the conventional "normal" persona isn't going to mess with most genres of metal, so I've made my peace with that. What I'm not okay with, specifically, is the notion of using my interests as an ongoing experiment for getting into metal music, despite voicing various criticisms and not having a connection to it. I get the a point of the club is for everyone involved to try to branch out and listen to things that are outside of everyone's respective comfort zones. But there is a point where that can be done to a fault, or in other words in case you're actually reading this, Jam: There's a point where you're just trying too hard, and maybe it's better to just stay in your lane; because frankly, if a more entry level group like System of a Down didn't catch much of your attention when you were younger and you regard growled vocals as a gimmick, then most likely nothing in my wheelhouse of technical death metal is going to resonate with you, so it would just be album after album with a moth or two of waiting just to get a "Nope" every single time. That's not fun to me. That's just a test of my patience. So, as for as activity and discussions go, you might want to rethink you black and white view of listening to and commenting on every album being "good" and skipping albums being "bad", and instead shift to a nuanced perspective because every album isn't going to be worth everyone's attention in terms of listening to and writing about it.

Another grievance I have is the "calling out" thing between thatpinguino and I with Vildhjarta and how that played out. That really didn't need to be a thing. It's not like I was going out of my way to seriously get at him for bailing on the album. In essence, I was reacting to a prediction I made shortly after Rivers of Nihil and got a laugh out of it turning out to be true. I don't have the exact words anymore, but let's be real here: Me saying "I knew he would bail on the album" was a light jab at worse, all things considered, so how that played out by him trying to make it a rule to not mention other people, and you, Jam, going on some spiel about sensitivity, empathy and some other shit after the situation was resolved at the moment... I mean, look; I'm aware of the negative stigma that comes with "internet discourse," but I still think you two were being oversensitive, and frankly, that type of attitude is one of my red flags when dealing with people in general. I know that you both want to have a pleasant community, but you two also have to know when to let things slide and not make mountains out of a molehills; or at least not take the passive-aggressive route as if speaking to me directly would have brought the situation to its worst possible conclusion, as if I'm an unreasonable person who hasn't grown out of 4chan.

Also, who is actually leading the group? Sombre came up with the idea and started the server, but Jam has been taking the reins and getting things going. I get that real life things happen and matter more than some online music club, but Jam should really be in control of the server since Sombre is preventing new channels from being created; including one that could have been used to keep track of the selected albums and whatnot instead of doing it externally though Google Docs. Not to be too much of a dick knowing what's up with him, but it doesn't change the truth of the situation.

And lastly, most of the albums have been pretty mid for me in terms of leaving a lasting impression. My only major takeaways were The Twilight Sad for being a relatively bold and unique departure from the more mainstream selections, PassCode for similar reasons along with being surprisingly good despite my negative view of J-Rock, and Kylie Minogue for me already being familiar with her. Nothing else has really latched on to me, which to me is another indication that I don't fit in with the group's core taste in music or how the group consumes music. As good as some of the albums were, I've only stuck with them during that week and moved on, as opposed to when I find something that I really like and stick with it for multiple weeks, months and years; basically, quality over quantity. Besides, I did predict this possibility back in July.

So, with all that said, good luck with the club. Hopefully the issues around participation and leadership can get sorted out. As for me, at this point, I've become becoming more and more done with this site/community since Vinny, Brad and Alex formed Nextlander, so this might double as my "Goodbye" for Giant Bomb when I find some greener pastures.

Finally caught up on this album and I thought it was okay. It was very broadway, but with very familiar metal instrumentals. The vocalist reminded me of Orpheus's singing in Hadestown and I think that makes sense since both works were going for a rock/broadway hybrid. I don't know if I'll go back to any individual song on this album other than When The Lights Are Down, but I enjoyed the whole work.