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Review:
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Coming from Russia, not Egypt, Sphinx perform romantic
symphonic metal, a blend of Wildpath, ELP’s ‘Pirates’, Al
Stewarts ‘Roads to Moscow’ and the most romantic metal album
of all time, Within Temptation’s Silent Force. Each song
is intended to be a soundtrack to an imaginary film, so
just dream up your favourite heroes from Johnny Depp to
Errol Flynn and let Sphinx take you away to a land of castles,
knights, princesses, pirates, pharaohs, Romans, Vikings
or anything else you heart desires. The orchestrations by
guitarist Andrey “Chronos” Potapov and bassist Andrey “Andersen”
Varenik are simply stupendous even though they were presumably
done on a computer, you’d never tell, the album sounds a
million dollars but was probably recorded for a song. They
are fronted by two delicious heroines with gorgeous semi
and fully operatic voices, Helena Eskina and Natalya Telyh,
helped by Andrey’s excellent voice. The lyrics are in Russian,
but it does not matter a jot, in fact it might spoil it,
the story in your head not matching the lyrics, like when
your favourite book gets turned into a film, it’s rarely
as you imagined. This is an absolute dream to listen to,
just lie back, close your eyes and get carried away on the
tide of this up-tempo, epic and enchanting music. This is
one of those albums you don’t want to finish, thankfully
they have also released a new EP in English called ‘White
Moon’ that you can download for free from their website,
http://sphinxmetal.com/
. The Ghost album itself can be carried away from the Fono
shop http://www.shop.fono.ru/ and EBay (it can also be translated
as Phantom rather than Ghost). Now if you excuse me, I want
to know the outcome of the final showdown between Johnny
and Errol on the bridge of the Flying Dustman, a swashbuckling
9.5 out of 10.
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