Musician/songwriter/singer, with the pompous Babylon Mystery Orchestra monicker factotum Sidney Allen Johnson realizes an album that seems undecided if moving among the wide true metal lands or along the trails of gothic rock, choosing an improbable and interesting middle way. A sort of Manowar meet Tiamat, in short. And, for how strange it can seem, the combination is almost successful. “On Earth As It Is In Heaven”, album telling apocryphal stories about fallen angels and universal storms, is a majestic sound painting that remarks a quantity of good ideas that are probably diluted within a too high length. Thirteen songs making up an ambitious and even arrogant concept, with not too modern sounds as well, admitted we can talk of modernity in such a context. That is the one of the most classic hard rock opera of American brand, with a musician of clear traditional matrix and with a metal fascination, able to write dark worthy riffs like “Violation” or “War Anthem” (pure Johan Edlund style) and to display a majestic epic pathos though a bit stereotyped (“Semjaza's Song”, “Recieve, Trust And Believe”). Not everything is perfectly balanced, as it’s normal for a work made by a single person, without the possibility to seek confrontation with other musicians, and some tracks have the bitter filler taste (“Heaven Can Wait”, “And The Waters Prevailed”), so much that in the end what we mainly remember is the will to stupefy creating a magniloquent atmosphere. If he had a group of high level musicians (as in the case of “Nostradamus” of Kotzev for example) he would surely reach a more interesting result. In particular a singer to replace that monotonous baritone lullaby that sometimes becomes bothering. For sure one’s to save the taste for certain solemn breaks and guitar scores that could also recall WASP and Meat Loaf. To rearrange in the future with bigger means at hand.

Flavio Ignelzi