THE PROG METAL GENIUS
Arjen Anthony Lucassen was already a veteran in the Dutch Heavy Metal scene, when he started to work in 1995 on his own Prog Metal concept album.
With the help of a number of Dutch guest singers and musicians, the album 'Ayreon – The Final Experiment' was recorded.
Today, that record is considered the first Metal Opera and a classic, even if it was no commercial success. Nevertheless, the Ayreon project was born!
The commercial and critical breakthrough came with the follow-up album, the 1998 masterpiece 'Into The Electric Castle'. Ever since, Arjen has been considered one of the leading players in the world of Prog Metal.
Four more successful Ayreon albums followed that were all part of one big sci-fi storyline centered around the mysterious Forever from the planet Y. The impressive story culminated with the stellar '01011001' double album in 2008.
By that time an impressive cast had sung on the Ayreon records, including the likes of Bruce Dickinson, Russel Allen, Mikael Akerfeld, and Floor Jansen (just to name a very few).
In the new millennium, Arjen released several records for a number of side projects and bands he started like Ambeon, Stream Of Passion, and Star One. Those releases often only achieved mixed commercial success, but they were always hailed with tremendous critical acclaim.
In the middle of the decade, Arjen went through a depression, caused by setbacks in his personal life. He used the emotions of that period to write music for a new project, called Guilt Machine, featuring Belgian singer Jasper Steverlinck of the Rock Band Arid. The dark album earned Arjen more glowing reviews.
In more recent years Arjen revived Ayreon, with the 2013 album 'The Theory Of Everything', startinge a whole new story line. In 2012, Arjen recorded his first real solo album, and he also started a new band The Gentle Storm with Dutch singer Anneke Van Giersbergen, who used to sing for The Gathering.
From all these projects and bands, we collected the best songs for this playlist, that celebrates the genius that is Arjen Anthony Lucassen!
Remember Forever...
Playlist:
01. Ayreon: Amazing Flight (1998)
02. Ayreon: Sail Away To Avalon (1995)
03. Stream Of Passion: Out In The Real World (2005)
04. Ayreon: And The Druids Turned To Stone (2000)
05. Ayreon: The New Migrator (2000)
06. Guilt Machine: Over (2006)
07. Ayreon: Day 2: Isolation (2004)
08. Star One: Cassandra Complex (2010)
09. Ayreon: Liquid Eternity (2008)
10. Arjen Anthony Lucassen: Pink Beatles In A Purple Zeppelin (2012)
11. Ayreon: The Theory Of Everything (2013)
12. The Gentle Storm: Heart Of Amsterdam (2015)
13. Ayreon: E=MC2 (2008)
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Metal --- part 1
SaggisticaThe ongoing history of Metal. This one is just for fun, and probably only fun for Heavy Metal and Hard Rock geeks like myself... The idea is simple: I wanted to bring together the ESSENTIAL Metal collection. Each short chapter gives informati...
