OK HERE YOU GO
Artist: Trans-Siberian Orchestra
Album:
Beethoven's Last Night
Year: 2000
Genre: Rock
Styles: Progressive metal, rock opera
Rating: 6/10
I received this CD as a Christmas gift from my girlfriend last year, but as it is not the sort of album I would normally have sought out I never gave it much of a proper listen. Now, however, I have decided to give TSO's music a closer listen. Founded in 1996 by three musicians who had previously worked together in power-metal act Savatage, the band became famous for a "Carol of the Bells"-for-guitar-heroes hit called "Christmas Eve/Sarajevo 12/24" which still remains part of the canon of gimmicky-but-fun holiday-season pop songs alongside "Jinglebell Rock", "Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer" and the like. Since 1999 the band has also been known for their over-the-top stage spectacle, a feast-for-the-eyes setup of pyrotechnics, lasers, and pretty much anything else the producers can get their hands on.
Beethoven's Last Night is the band's only album not based on Christmas music, instead based on "arrangements" of the music of Ludwig van Beethoven formed into an epic rock-opera telling a fantastical fictional story about the composer's....well, last night. I use the term arrangements loosely because the final result resembles the source material only through small motifs (mainly famous excerpts from pieces like the "Moonlight Sonata" and the Ninth Symphony, along with, oddly, some Mozart and Rimsky-Korsakov as well). Except "Fur Elise", which is, in fact "Fur Elise", these are new songs with some familiar melodies, not painstaking adaptations.
The songs are a mix of heavy metal--of the melodic persuasion, complete with palm-muted riffing, wailing leads, pinch harmonics, and the like--and power ballads of the sort you might hear on FM classic rock radio. This is
not music of Beethoven caliber, with subtlety, ambiguity, and elaborate design--but then, no one is really expecting that from a TSO album anyway. I do, however, feels that it is rather weak, for several reasons. The main problem here is that, like most arena rock, at 73 minutes it is a tiring affair. Many bands think that if you strum one epic power chord per measure, each power chord an epic circle-of-fifths jump from the previous, while a vocalist hits really notes and sings something that can't quite be called a melody above you, you will sound epic. In reality, though, you will sound tedious. This is why ballads like "After the Fall" fail. The vocals in general have a precious, overwrought cheesy faux-operatic feel ("cheesiness" is pretty much central to this album's nature), and the lyrics are ultra-Romantic important-sounding silliness with words like "prattle" thrown in to manufacture a nineteenth-century atmosphere. The orchestral synths are of a very bad and campy 1980s quality. The snare drum sound is annoying, and the use of the low end of the piano as a bass is dubious. Classical motifs are thrown in when they make no sense, with no connection to what has just happened in the music (the way "A Last Illuision" jumps from "Flight of the Bumblebee" to "Ode to Joy" is the biggest example). Most importantly, the obviousness of the whole affair is quite grating.
But despite all these flaws, I don't actually hate or even dislike it. The point here is to recapture a childlike innocence and wonder, and while it often fails, the effort is admirable. If you listen to it purely emotionally, abandoing all reservations about tackiness, kitchiness, tastelessness, and silliness, there is quite a bit of fun material here--"Requeim (9th Symphony)" is very catchy with its hard-rock riffs, as is "Vienna" with its '80s synth beat. This is not great music or art, but that doesn't mean it is bad entertainment. In fact, at times it's even beautiful.