Awaken the Guardian
Label: Metal Blade
Rated: NONE
WorkNameSort: Awaken the Guardian
This 1986 album from Fates Warning was the band’s third, coming after two albums steeped in the influence of mid-period Iron Maiden. Though Guardian didn’t do a lot to dispel the nagging Maiden comparisons, it did show that Fates Warning was nonetheless possessed of a unique sound that was a sort of underground antidote to the fast-commercializing sound of Maiden, ratcheting up the epic structures, foot-on-the-monitor vocalizing and the where’s-my-mythology-book lyrics. Twenty years later, Awaken the Guardian holds up far better than Somewhere in Time, Maiden’s poppy effort of the same year.
This exhaustive three-disc reissue provides an excellent look at the album. The first disc contains a wonderfully remastered version of the album (if you’ve heard any previous CD versions, you know why this is good), while the second disc consists of demos and live tracks. The third a DVD presents a live show from late in the year. All this bonus material is great, especially for all the hardcore FW fans out there who tend to dismiss the band’s early work as inferior to the current, prog-heavy sound they now mine.
Still, the driving dynamics of the original album’s eight songs are what will keep the old-school metalheads coming back to the first disc. Squeezing maximum impact out of a minimal budget, Awaken the Guardian proved that brains and brawn weren’t mutually exclusive in mid-’80s metal, managing to be neither ridiculously overblown nor overly reductionist.
Songs like “Prelude to Ruin” (all churning riffs and vocal histrionics) and the prog-thrash of “Valley of the Dolls” are bold and dense without being indulgently intricate, providing a visceral thrill the band would soon abandon in pursuit of smarty-pants complexity.
This article appears in Jul 6-12, 2005.