On the band’s Facebook page recently, Avantasia ringmaster Tobias Sammet declared new album A Paranormal Evening With the Moonflower Society to be his favourite, containing ‘the best songs he’s ever written’ – so is that to-be-expected artistic pride seeping onto the digital page, or real, inarguable fact? I felt I should have a listen to find out…

‘Quintessential’ is possibly a better way to describe the album than ‘best’, with many of the songs sounding like they’ve been written to fulfill a role within the story rather than because they might genuinely move the writers, performers of, most importantly, the listener. That’s the problem with concept albums of course, and, now that Avantasia are so irredeemably cemented in our hearts and ears, it becomes an almost impossible task for Herr Sammet and company to create something that truly extends Avantasia’s envelope.

That said, the utterly glorious, hair-raising power metal of The Inmost Light will have you catching your breath and wiping a nostalgic tear from the eye as Michael Kiske hits the high notes on a song that was surely written for one of Helloween‘s Keeper… albums but somehow didn’t make the cut. This is genuinely moving stuff if you’re a metal fan of a certain age, and stands out as the album’s high point for just that reason.

Similarly the quasi-ballad Misplaced Angels stands as just out-and-out great songwriting in it’s own right; Sammett has always done over-the-top emotion well, and here his vocal is off the scale, as is the performance of co-vocalist Floor Janssen on a song that sounds like it should have been written for Robin Beck in her ‘coke’ days,if you see what I mean. Elsewhere the more rock n’roll Eric Martin vehicle Rhyme and Reason works for precisely that reason – it sounds like something heavier off of Sucker For A Pretty Face rather than a shoehorned-in piece of Americana on a Euro power metal album, and works superbly accordingly.

The other material is great, of course, but the familiarity in 2022 of Sammet’s compositional style means that it’s comforting to hear veteran co-conspiritors like Bob Catley, Geoff Tate (who always seems to sound better on Avantasia albums than he does on his own…) and Ronnie Atkins doing their bit rather than truly captivating. Would we have it any other way? probably not, and obviously I’d rather hear something like the elegantly put together Paper Plane on the radio than more auto-tuned drones selling pizza; So probably it’s best to simply celebrate what we have, and not bemoan what we do not. In other words, this is ‘just’ another superb offering from Tobi Sammett.

A Paranormal Evening With the Moonflower Society releases on October 21st.