Avaland have released To Fool A Witch, the last song out of Chemical Poetry before Storytium put the album out on Friday.
Adrien G. Gzagg explains how it is put together rather than how good it is, which is rarer than it should be. "Rather than relying on an immediate hook, the vocal lines were designed around melody and emotional progression," he says. "The true leitmotif of the song emerges through the descending chromatic guitar riff, which constantly returns to haunt the listener throughout the track."
That descending figure is meant to sound like a witch laughing at you from somewhere offstage, and the French choral passages around it push the whole thing further towards opera than most power metal dares.
This is a metal opera in the full sense: a cast of singers, a protagonist called Aylan Wilstorm, and a God of Time sung by Jeff Kanji watching him fail. The record is their third and it lands on 30 October.