Best Songs from Symphony X's Twilight in Olympus

While not as instantly memorable as some other songs on the album, there is no doubt that this 13 minute epic is the pinnacle of the album. For one, I love the lyrical content, as Alice Through the Looking Glass is a great book, but as well as this, the song amazingly balances wonderful, soft moments, with some extremely interesting, heavy riffs, creating a consistently enjoyable experience.

The drum intro made my jaw drop the first time I heard it, as it was so much heavier and faster than anything else I had heard by the band. This is definitely a song that is perfectly balanced between the melodic elements, such as the chorus, and some slightly more heavy elements, especially fast paced drumming. Both the guitar solo and the bass solo manage to be utterly amazing, and make this a definite highlight from the album, being able to fit so much in such a short time.

The intro to this song is amazing, building up from eerie ambience to a majestic display of vocal harmonisation that creates as choir like effect. The song is incredibly intense, with its guitar work having a lot of emphasis on short, sharp bursts of notes at many points. The work of the keyboard is also particularly noteworthy, as the organ noises add to this whole atmosphere of some sort of church for a cult of some sort, all in all creating a highly memorable song.

There is an incredibly strong neoclassical sound to this track, with a more standard structure, but simply breathtaking instrumental work all around, and an incredible chorus.

The riffs are absolutely killer throughout, and the vocal melodies are incredible, with the small bits of layered backing vocals adding a lot to the overall power of the song, with the chorus all bringing this up to a whole other level.

The middle eastern sound used at the start is an extremely large departure from the regular neoclassical power metal sound that the band employs. Along with this, a ballad is an incredibly rare occurrence for this band, making this a further unique song for them. Despite this, I still find this to be one of the weaker songs on the album, although still very good.

The guitar tone is quite heavy on this track, making for a slightly different feel compared to the rest of the album, and it makes for another great track. I find the slightly less theatrical approach applied here to cause it to be a less memorable track compared to the others however, but even despite this, it's still hard to deny that this is a great song.