Warthur
Ayreon's third album pulls out all the stop - gathering a small army of guest vocalists, Arjen Lucassen goes for broke, offering up a two-CD rock opera with a plot straight out of cheesy fantasy B-movies: a party of mismatched adventurers from across time and space have been assembled to go on a quest into the Electric Castle because... well, don't lean too hard on the plot otherwise it'll fall over.
Unfortunately, Lucassen just doesn't pull the project off. Firstly, there just isn't 100 minutes of top-notch music here: there's too much filler and too many musical ideas are bent out of shape in order to accommodate the storyline. His ambitions also seem to have run away with him when it comes to the wide range of vocalists invited to take part in the project - sure, there's some talented people here, but there's too many of them for the purposes of the narrative, with the result that some of the vocalists don't get many more than a few lines and the characters in the adventuring party are little more than cannon fodder to be killed off or written out of the story bit by bit. (You have a talent like Fish onboard and you kill him off partway through? What are you thinking?)
To be honest, I really don't get why this album got the attention it did. It gets points for excess, I suppose, but a narrative concept album built on excess but without strong music or a good story to back it out is just empty bluster.