Masquerade

During their first two years the band concentrated on writing music, rehearsing, and performing live. In 1990 Masquerade recorded a promotional cassette and a single that was favorably reviewed in the English magazine Metal Hammer. After signing on with Empire Records, in early 1991 the band started recording their self-titled album. The record company brought the engineer Ronny Lahti (Saigon Kick, Europe, Talisman, Electric Boys, Clockwise) into the project for finalizing the mixing. The album was released in 1992 to positive reviews by critics, who found the album comparable to the music of bands like Whitesnake and Def Leppard.

Arcturus, like only a few bands, during their career managed to change their sound on every album. The famous debut album is a classic Symphonic Black Metal release, but 1997's "La Masquerade Infernale" is everything but Black Metal. Garm's shrieking is put aside, (Garm himself actually is) letting G.Wolf do the job, with the occasional help of ICS Vortex on a few tracks. Black Metal being gone, Arcturus create a strange, unique sound that is surely metal sounding, but it doesn't have its attitude, not one bit. For starters the music is very theatrical, especially in the weird vocals, high pitched and sort of operatic. The music is very orchestrated, meaning that all the instruments, keyboards, strings, guitars, vocals, have all a very classical attitude when playing, keyboards being the main attraction. The combination of instruments, or more accurately the music itself, is changing pretty frequently, a characteristic that can be found in a lot of Avant-Garde Metal…

Pendragon's release of "The Masquerade Overture" represents one of the 90's strongest prog releases yet! This brilliant recording sets new heights for neo-prog acts in terms of complete recordings. "The Masquerade Overture" really does capture the essence of concept-like story line and takes the listener into a completely new world. The mix of opera, orchestra and the symphonic tendency of Pendragon seems to work to perfection on this release. There are some nice and tasty guitar / bass parts scattered throughout all of the songs. Nick Barrett adds some great vocals throughout which give it that unmistakeable Pendragon feel.

RCA put a major push behind Armenian conductor Loris Tjeknavorian in the 1970s and '80s, and this two-disc set, Khachaturian: Gayne (Complete Ballet), restores to the active catalog a highly desirable recording at a price that is entirely reasonable. When it first appeared in 1976, Tjeknavorian's Gayne (Gayane), made with the National Symphony Orchestra, was a mite controversial in that it was marketed as "complete"; Khachaturian fanatics had long sought a complete Gayne, as the suites Khachaturian had prepared from the ballet were common on recordings, but not the work as a whole.

Syrius was formed by Zsolt Baronits in 1962, Budapest, mainly to play beat music. The band profile changed in 1970 when they started playing progressive rock and jazz-rock fusion, when Jackie Orszaczky (bass, vocal), László Pataki (organ), Mihály Ráduly (saxophone, flute) and András Veszelinov (drums) joined the band. They got a contract in Australia where they recorded their most famous album called 'Devil's Masquerade'. There's that early 70s experimental feel to it as well - especially in some of the saxophone parts here, you get sudden bursts of unbridled free-jazz inching its way through the orchestrated wilderness. Still you never loose focus - you're still infatuated by warm and vibrant melody lines, that for some reason always seem a bit hidden beneath these mad interventions - either emanating from the aforementioned sax or an altogether preposterous sounding flute…

Theatrical metal – that’s how the four Danes of EVIL MASQUERADE have chosen to name their particular brand of music, and they do manage to deliver solid evidence, that also in the country of red sausages, the will to experiment and take great different paths in music is as great as ever…