format: LP
year: 1990
country: Portugal
label: Polydor
#: 843 449-1
info: innersleeve w/ lyrics
style: Power Metal
Side A:
Side B:
No matter what size you'd prefer your personal Great Hall Of Fantasy Album Cover-Art Fame to be, this sophomore release of Portugal's greatest sons TARANTULA should surely be reseved a spot. Not only is it a beautiful piece epic HM art (so what if it's a deadringer for "Awaken The Guardian" - it's a bloody IMPROVEMENT), it also matches the music to the last brush stroke!
...but let's first summarize some notes on the band's debut from 3 years prior, because like, context and stuff: "Tarantula" was one of those perfectly imperfect messes of an album, packed with some seriously skewed, occasionally outright weird Power Metal songwriting, often incorporating peculiar mellow/major scale harmonies and squeezing them into all the wrong places - "acquired-taste" and "foreign" would be the 2 most fitting adjectives to describe this curiosity. A terribly cool & underrated piece of Obsküre Steel in other words. Despite the awful digital drums.
"Kingdom Of Lusitania" is a huge step forward as far as professionalism goes and practically everything is in its proper place here. REAL drums, tight musicianship, good production and the tunes hold an international standard and feel well thought out, without loosing all of that originality from its predecessor. The kind of Metal that the band is churning out this time around is very easily cathegorized - it's 90's Power Metal through and through. Now I want to make perfectly clear that while this is not my favourite cup of molten lead, there is no denying the level of craftmanship present. I'll even go so far as to call this ahead-of-its-time, seeing as the explosion of post-Helloween European Power Metal hadn't quite happened yet and I guess Tarantula were only a poor management decision away from having struck Big in this scene.
From the "Ode To Joy" rip-off chorus of "Highway To Glory" to the
symphonic semi-ballad "The Saga Of Sebastian, The King" we're taken on a journey through all the pillars of the genre: The Helloween/Gamma Ray pomp, the Qeensrÿche/Fates Warning prog, the fast verses, the slow bridges and the neo-classical interludes. As said, I'm not quite the right person to thoroughly dissect this release any deeper than that, and trying to convince anyone that I actually prefer their sloppy debut over this will be a hard sell, so I won't even try.
As far as availability goes, this is even more rare than the first album, but it was rerelased on LP and pic-disc by a Portuguese label
in 2014 and only last year on CD, so finding your own path towards the music of KoL should be fairly easy.