The artist: Christopher Lee shouldn't need an introduction, especially when he's a top notch actor. However, what does need to be stated is his contribution to heavy metal in the recent years. As his two favourite bands are Rhapsody and Manowar, he was more than willing to work with Rhapsody for their albums involving The Dark Saga. Following the first two albums he contributed to Rhapsody, Christopher Lee decided to work on a symphonic metal album of his own. He later had a voice role for Manowar's Battle Hymns MMXI where he spoke the narration in Dark Avenger which was originally done by Orson Welles.
The album: Charlemagne: By The Sword and the Cross is Christopher Lee's symphonic metal album project. The album is based on King Charlemagne who Christopher Lee claims is one his ancestors. The album is divided in acts and while it goes through the history of Charlemagne, it's hard to not think that there are probably too many intro tracks in the album. Counting the overture, Charlemagne contains SIX intro tracks. That is rather overkill but one song that sticks out very well is the third act The Bloody Verdict of Verden. Although this album is more neoclassical than metal, it's hard to overlook a big actor like Christopher Lee making his own heavy metal album. You can never be too old to be metal!
The song: The Bloody Verdict of Verden is strongly symphonic just like the rest of the album but it's also the strongest metal sounding. This part of the concept album is based on the massacre of Saxons in 782 A.D. which is easily stated with the awesome chorus. Christopher Lee manages to makes this song very dramatic throughout the song which is what you need when you're singing about many men killed. As stated before, this song has an awesome chorus with Lee shouting out "I SHED THE BLOOD OF THE SAXON MEN!" many times. It may be repetitive but it needs to address the amount of men who were murdered in the massacre of Verden. Fortunately the song provides a majestic riff and solo at the end giving the heavy metal feeling it requires. Overall, this is a great song sung by Christopher Lee. Credit has to be given to both him and the instrumental contributors for this fine work and hopefully he still has plenty of time to make more contributions to the heavy metal universe.
No comments:
Post a Comment