lördag 24 Dec 2005, 17:05
In case it isn't obvious from the statistics in my profile, I have been infatuated with the band Ayreon for quite a while now. Ayreon really isn't a band, though; it is a project by Dutch multi-instrumentalist Arjen Anthony Lucassen (who is also responsible for Star One, Ambeon and more recently Stream Of Passion), with a cast of instrumentalists and vocalists that change constantly between albums. Anyway, I'm sure most of the people even vaguely interested in this article already know these facts, so I'll move on.
I found that, as Arjen makes use of people from other bands, buying and listening to Ayreon albums is a good way to discover new bands that I might like. Therefore, I thought that it might be a good idea to reflect on my discoveries so that others may benefit from them. Feel free to reply with comments and other band suggestions that I may have so far missed (I know there are a few).
When I heard Anneke Van Giersbergen in Ayreon's Into The Electric Castle (my personal favourite album by Ayreon), I really liked her voice and so decided to check out her main band. The Gathering's earlier work is Symphonic metal that could be likened to the likes of Lacuna Coil or Within Temptation. For the metal side of things, I would suggest trying both Mandylion Nighttime Birds. After those releases, the band moved towards more conventional rock territory that is still very good. Highly recommended.
The progressive metal band's ex-vocalist Damian Wilson appearing in The Human Equation and Star One's Space Metal, whose voice I also liked, was the main stimulus for my checking out Threshold. The fact that they were described as The UK's answer to Dream Theater was also a contributing factor. Although not quite as progressive or as technical as Dream Theater, Threshold is a decent band with some consistently good material. Actually, some have argued that they shouldn't really be called prog. Still recommended for fans of catchy keyboard-laden metal, though.
For the sake of building a connected music list as unnecessarily huge as possible, I would like to add all of the connected bands that I already knew of or discovered independently: classic neo-prog band Marillion (whose old singer, Fish, appeared in Into The Electric Castle), seminal prog-metal band Symphony X (whose singer, Russell Allen, appeared in Space Metal), you've probably heard of Dream Theater (whose singer, James LaBrie, appeared in The Human Equation), and the also well-known band Opeth (whose vocalist, Mikael Åkerfeldt, appeared in The Human Equation).