To take a phrase from Spinal Tap seeing as it resembles most of their career for the last eight years, Stratovarius really are a bunch of poncey hairdressers. Since their two-part "Elements" album divided the band in that everyone except Timo Tolkki thought (quite rightly) that everything on it was slow, repetitive and dull, they split up, reformed with a different singer, split up again, reformed back together with the lineup from before that, lost a bassist, found a bassist, released The Worst Album In The World (AKA "Stratovarius"), were dormant for about three years, and then split up entirely - all while going through so much pointless public Internet drama over the band's forums, main site and their own individual Myspace pages that I'm genuinely surprised that there isn't an entry for them in Encyclopedia Dramatica to link to at this point.

Except the band seems to have T-1000-like properties in that every time it's smashed to pieces they eventually crawl their way back together again, and it now seems that Stratovarius might limp on yet. Rather than ending completely, the three members of the band who still manage to get on reasonably well together asked Tolkki if they could have the rights to the name and the back catalogue, and after much deliberation that he goes on about in coma-inducing length in the latest of many open letters, he eventually decided to agree just to somehow make the point that he was the better person, while dropping hints about comparing himself to John Lennon and Beethoven. And they've just put a cheery "Thank you" message up in response to all that self-indulgence. So there may still be a few releases yet, although I'm rather afraid that they'll consist mostly of Kotipelto's rubbish songs that Tolkki wouldn't allow him to use when he was in the band.

To be fair to Timo Tolkki, washing his hands of the whole disaster is probably the best thing to do. He put out a statement that he was instead spending his time disappearing further up his considerably-proportioned rear end by writing a metal opera instead - except he's further announced that he is going to come back, but only for one album this time, absolutely certainly. I'm sure that even the average FA user can see that this is getting stupid.

Anyway. With all of that going on, Tolkki also had some material that was intended for Stratovarius before the third time they split up for good, and he's got together a band of musicians that still agree to work with him for some reason (notably Michael Kiske and Tobias Sammet) under the hyper-pretentious name "Revolution Renaissance" to release it. And though I'm really quite surprised to be saying this, it actually seems to be quite decent. If this is anything to go by, anyway.

Artist: Revolution Renaissance
Album: New Era
Song: Last Night on Earth
Visuals: Pretentious album cover with several random effects on it for some reason
The melody is far more... melodic than anything Stratovarius did post-Infinite, and unlike anything from that era it seems to actually have some life to it. There are a couple of Heavenly-like twists to the English language as we speak and understand it to get the lyrics to fit, most obvious on the pronounciation of the word "Utopia" on the chorus ("inventive" is just about the politest way I can put it), but Kotipelto used to do that to a greater or lesser extent all the time anyway.

But the thing that really leaps out at me is that we all know that Michael Kiske doesn't really like a whole lot of noise, and to be honest, it shows a bit here. You get the feeling that he's holding back, and that the chorus should have been much more massive and epic somehow. They should get Piet Sielck on board for that - he'd sort them out.