Edguy - Age of the Joker (2011) - Age of the bad jokes - 36% (07/09/14)

A couple of years ago I wrote a quite emotional negative review of Edguy’s “Age Of The Joker” but I decided to let the album grow on me and give it a second chance. More than three years after its initial release, I must sadly admit that this is still the band’s weakest release in my opinion. Workaholic Tobias Sammet had put all its creative input into the Avantasia project and at that point Edguy was only a collecting tank for immature ideas that weren’t good enough to find a righteous place on an Avantasia record.

Most of the album doesn’t have anything to do with the band’s energizing power metal roots. That alone wouldn’t be much of a problem if the band headed for a new brave direction or performed at least some creative rock music but that’s not the case either. First off, we get overlong old-fashioned hard rock tracks that seem to be a mixture of faceless Avantasia leftover material and half-hearted worship of Tobias Sammet’s favourite bands like Deep Purple. The worst example is the plodding and unspectacular opener “Robin Hood” with its laughable organ sounds that is no comparison to previous majestic rock opera openers like “Sacrifice” or heavier introductions like “Mysteria”. The album’s so-called epic “Behind The Gates To Midnight World” suffers from the same problem. This song would have been a rather decent track with a running time of five minutes but almost nine minutes are way too much. This unbearable piece of boredom goes straight to nowhere.

The second kind of tracks we get on here are silly and overtly commercial drinking anthems like “Two Out Of Seven” with adolescent lyrics like “what the fuck, suck my cock” and extremely childish keyboard melodies that could also come from Marky Mark. “Breathe” sounds just as ridiculous even though the lyrics are slightly better. Edguy had a couple of humorous and still intelligent tracks on each album in the past but the intellectual level has consecutively been lowered since then. “Age Of The Joker” has reached the absolute nadir. Listening to the abominable “Two Out Of Seven” almost makes me feel ashamed to be a fan of the band.

Only two songs on here are at least good and would have been much better if they weren’t so artificially stretched to lengths above six minutes. These songs really prove that Tobias Sammet’s song writing qualities had decreased at that time and that he should have given more creative space to his band mates. “Rock Of Cashel” has a longing atmosphere in the verses, a joyful and catchy chorus and includes beautiful folk melodies in the middle part. “Pandora’s Box” sounds like a country rock version of “The Piper Never Dies” with a kitschy but somewhat majestic chorus borrowed from a recent Avantasia track. The sad truth is that even the best songs on here would have been filler material on records like “Hellfire Club”. 

While the limited edition includes a few good tracks that should have made it on the regular album, this remains by far Edguy’s weakest release in my opinion. I can definitely not recommend this record. I only bought it because I own all Edguy records and have been a long-time fan. When I first listened to this record three years ago, I was simply disappointed and a little bit angry. Now, I happen to find this album extremely boring and embarrassing which is probably even worse. No, this release didn’t grow on me, I even dislike it more now than before and it had taken quite some dust on its shelf before I decided to grab and give it a few spins again. I’m sure it will accumulate loads of dust again over the next years.