Awaken the Guardian
Occupation
- Vocals: John Arch
- Guitar: Jim Matheos
- Guitar: Frank Aresti
- Bass: Joe DiBiase
- Drums: Steve Zimmerman
Awaken the Guardian is the third studio album by American progressive metal band Fates Warning. It was released in 1986 by Metal Blade Records and is regarded as crucial to the development of the genre.
Creation and publication
After a few U.S. concerts due to the release of The Spectre Within Fates Warning took their third album in September and October 1986, now with Frank Aresti place Victor Arduini as a guitarist. Jim Archambault played a the keyboards, the band and Brian Slagel produced the album Eddy Schreyer mastered it. After the release of Awaken the Guardian in November 1986 John Arch left the band and was replaced by Ray Alder.
In 1994 appeared a remastered version of the album, in 2005, another with bonus CD and DVD, which contain mainly live recordings.
Title list
Style
Awaken the Guardian is the last album the band influenced by Fantasy song lyrics and musically is already well above the traditional heavy metal addition. Fates Warning playing here atmospheric progressive metal with complex structures, changing rhythms, unusual melodies and harmonies, versatile guitar playing and high vocals. The pieces are held in mid-tempo and often have a mystical or oriental -inspired atmosphere.
Reception
The album was in 1986 already received by the press and is now considered groundbreaking and classic progressive metal. Iliad of Vampster sums up: " Never before has managed a band such an engaging, [ sic] combination of classic heavy metal and technically challenging structures that also - not least thanks to the imaginative texts - could come up with an extremely dense atmosphere. " For George Heep of the Baby Blue Pages is considered the album " today as a reference for fast, but always melodic Heavy Metal, succumb to its progressive ambitions never the charm of supercooled technology demonstration". Jörg Schumann describes it as " an important album that has much co-founded a new game form of progressive rock ". Boris Kaiser from Rock Hard considers it "pure, pure magic " and the magazine chose Awaken the Guardian the most important progressive metal album; also eclipsed the magazine took the album on its list of the milestones of the genre.