Though it was spawned from a roiling fusion of sludgy blues riffs and occult imagery, heavy metal music shares more common threads with Vivaldi and Wagner than with Johnson and John Lee. Case in point: Tobias Sammet’s metal opera supergroup, Avantasia. Led by former Edguy frontman Sammet and featuring the likes of Mr. Big’s Eric Martin and Geoff Tate of Queensrÿche, Avantasia takes swirling symphonic textures and smashes them together with piercing guitar leads and gritty vocal lines. Avantasia comes to town this weekend on the heels of Moonglow, their eighth LP—which features a head-banging rendition of Michael Sembello’s “Maniac.”
Avantasia
Fri, 8pm, $48+
City National Civic, San Jose
