Blind Guardian
Member
I think IX Equilibrium is somewhat overlooked. Not a great album, and fairly unambitious, but it has some really cool songs and it's more varied and creative than the first two.
I can totally understand why so many people hate this album. If you consider the compositional potential Emperor showed with ITNE, this - i.e favoring technicality instead of songwriting - was really the wrong way to go. However I still fucking like it in its own right at least, because the masturbation that is there tends to be really awesome. An Elegy of Icaros builds amazing riff after amazing riff on each other for almost seven minutes.