Review by Tobias on April 16, 2001.

Metal veterans Savatage are back with yet another thematic album addition to their powerful twenty year history. Savatage have always been story-tellers, and they were perhaps the very first to bring in the epic and operatic feel to metal albums. I’m prefacing the review with this because when it comes to the concept work of Savatage, you really need to take the whole package into consideration.

With the likes of Hall of the Mountain King and Wake of Magellan behind their belts, Savatage certainly needed something with a slightly different edge to it. That isn’t to say that the music has changed, though. The story behind Poets & Madmen is perhaps the most disturbing and interesting of all to date. It follows three guys with nothing better to do, who break into an abandoned asylum to discover a disturbing story of a Pulitzer prize winning photographer gone mad and have a bit of a surreal experience.

The problem that I find with the story telling of Savatage, particularly on Poets & Madmen, is that you can’t figure out what the story is by reading the lyrics; they’re just way too cryptic and ambiguous to effectively weave a story together. Of course, I had a pre-release promo CD to review without the official sleeve that might include the story, but I had to go to Savatage.com to read the short story that the album was based on. After doing this, listening to the album suddenly became a much more interesting experience.

So to take the music aside from the story and judge it separately I think is somewhat unfair to the work of art that Savatage are delivering. However, I still feel the loss of Criss Oliva in the guitar work. Somehow it just seems a little bland compared to the intensity and flair that he’d added to the albums before his unfortunate departure from this earth.

That aside, this album still has a lot of interesting and entertaining listening to offer. Savatage’s ever present trademark sound like metalized classical music is almost brainfood on tracks like Morphine Child and Surrender.

Bottom Line: Fun story telling from the concept metal vets, but still lacking much of the excitement and edginess that the late Criss Oliva brought to the band on albums like Mountain King and Gutter Ballet.

Rating: 7 of 10

Review by Michael on July 10, 2001.

The first time I gave this CD a spin I couldn’t help but laugh. With an average song length of about 30 seconds, and the average song name of about 8 words….it seems there is only enough time in each track to say the title and then move on to the next one. I’m not sure exactly what Agoraphobic Nosebleed were trying to achieve with this release, and to be honest I have no idea of whether or not they actually achieved it. They are written up as a Grind Core band, but I’m not exactly a wealth of knowledge in this genre. From everything that I’ve heard and seen….Grind Core is the name you give any music that sounds like drilling concrete (in 30 second intervals).

Now to the songs themselves. Well, I don’t think I can really call them songs….because they don’t seem to contain any pre-conceived structure at all. It sounded more like someone yelled out “ok guys, the mics on” and the band just started kicking their instruments around the room while the vocalist concentrates on fitting in all 8 title words into his 30 second timeframe, in a style that sounds surprisingly like someone is cutting his arm off with scissors. There are no real drums on this recording, only drum machines. I don’t think they spent too many hours programming the beats for each song, they just dialled up a couple of snare, kick and symbol sounds, turned the tempo up to about 400 and pressed play 26 times during the recording.

I think the only reason they actually created separate ‘tracks’ is so all the fans can use that little random button on their stereos, and challenge each other to a game of ‘which track is that?’. I’m quite sure that I would lose this game as I found myself checking if there was a problem with my CD player every 5 minutes (that’s about 14 songs by the way) to see if it was stuck on the same track.

Bottom Line: In all fairness to Agoraphobic Nosebleed, this cannot be a serious release. With tracks like ‘Polished Turd’, ‘Hat Full of Shit’ and the all time classic ‘How Sean Through His Back Out Sneezing’, I don’t expect this album to go down in metal history.

Rating: 3.5 out of 10