Masquerade

Japanese edition of 1996 album with 3 bonus tracks. 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.

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…

In February, 2014, Robert Maloschik decided to recreate "Devil's Masquerade" (1971), the only official album release of the legendary group Syrius, to be recorded and re-arranged and conceived for jazz by a band formed of five young Hungarian jazz musicans, the Syrius Legacy, who are the best and most demanded players on their respective instruments of their age. 18 months and 15 performances later, in early September 2015. their debut album, titled "The Devil's Masquerade Reloaded" was finished. The strong cohesion of the group derives from their admiration of the old Syrius themes, their respect for Mihaly Raduly and the constant support from Mr. Maloschik.