Customer Reviews

Lepaca Kliffoth

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My experience with Therion started with some 'copy-of-a-copy' cassetes, back when i was a kid (8 years ago ;)). From this time i have never hesitated to trust them with any new album. One day, i spotted a brand new title lying on the shelf. In a milisecond it was already in my hand and in next couple ones - in my cd player...and there it remained :) If you would ever like to hear a song being truly a divine masterpiece - go for The Beauty in Black (plus the ouverture of it - Arrival of the darkest Queen) from this album. The rest of them is also wonderfully arranged, balanced and played. Lure into fantastic climate along with such great songs like Lepaca Kliffoth, Riders of Theli or The Wings of the Hydra... The list would continue, eventually covering all tracks. You have to listen to it, there is simply _no other choice_ :)))

Therion didn't invent symphonic metal, since the idea of coupling hard rock and classical instrumentation goes as far as Deep Purple's Concerto for Group and Orchestra project in 1969, and underground metal bands like Celtic Frost experimented with symphonic samples and operatic vocals in the mid 80s. That said, because of Theli's runaway success, most metalheads consider Cristopher Johnsson (the band's main musical driving force during the band's long and storied career) the father of this subgenre, since that album was the first successful coupling of two very disparate musical camps and for once, the symphonic parts sounded like they were composed alongside the riffs and not added as an afterthought. After its 1996 seminal album, Therion kept repeating this winning formula with bigger budgets by replacing samples with real instruments and adding more opera singers in each subsequent album with varying degrees of artistic success.
Originally Therion was a death metal band. By its third album, Symphony Masses, Chistopher Johnsson started toying with some pseudo classical sounds and industrial textures. On Lepaca Kliffoth, the band's fourth full length album, he introduced operatic singing, which would become a staple of the band's sound on later albums, and gave more prominence to the classical instrumentation than before, but still, the symphonic elements feel somewhat grafted to the songs. That said, tracks like The Wings of the Hydra and The Beauty in Black foreshadow the artistic heights the band woult achieve on its next album, so despite its transitional nature, this album is highly recommended to any symphonic metal fan not only because of its historical importance, but also for its songs, which may not be as strong and musically realized as those in Theli, but still much better than most of the band's post Lemuria/Sirus B output.