Rhapsody - Legendary Tales

birth of genre topster

Some of you, I’m sure, see this and groan. You think you’re too good for this? You’re not! Try as you might to suppress that feeling, something within you lives when you hear Fabio Leone belt out “MIGHTY WARRIOR” on the first chorus. People who are reading this tend towards music which is dark and transgressive. You may not want to believe me, but right now, Legendary Tales is more transgressive than any avant dissoshit blackened death metal on the 2025 sheet.

Everyone at some point in their lives has engaged with high fantasy, but in modern times, the most popular forms are grimdark morally ambiguous miserable worlds. Legendary Tales comes from 1997. A simpler (I assume) time. Look at the dragon on the cover art. Do you see the castle? Do you see the waterfall? Have you noticed that the album title looks suspiciously like the Dragonlance logo? This aesthetic was dead by the time I became an adult, yet I have a great passion for this colorful, detailed style of classic fantasy novels. Someday I will fill my home with Larry Elmore prints.

Dragons of Autumn Twilight [1984] Art: Larry Elmore (left), Rhapsody - Legendary Tales [1997] Art: Eric Phillipe (left)

The Birthstopster project has been called “birth of genre topster” and this is no exception. Legendary Tales is the template for what we call symphonic power metal. In nearly every track you’ll get lethally melodic power metal riffs, high pitched vocals operatically leading you through “magical wonder enchanted fury majestic force”, string sections, choirs, flute breakdowns, and, of course, SHRED.

Whenever Luca Turilli starts a solo he adds that final layer of exuberance that elevates each already bombastic song to a spectacle. While listening to this album, I find it hard to not crack a smile at how committed Rhapsody are to being over-the-top. What I realized is that the smile wasn’t coming from the dueling solos between the shred guitar and the keyboards / strings, but from the big fat :yngwie: power metal choruses. Since listening to this album for the first time after the announcement of this project, I increasingly found myself unconsciously humming, and then singing the chorus of “Rage of the Winter”.

Legendary Tales isn’t all choruses and shred though. Sometimes they play songs like “Forest of Unicorns” which feature no metal at all. I’m not sure if I hate this track or find it charming. The last few tracks of the album are more in-line stylistically with the rest, but with much less energy. If a song isn’t a spectacle, there’s really no place for it here. Maybe these songs segue into their 2nd album which continues the 5 album concept storyline which I assume was initially created in Luca Turilli’s AD&D campaign.