Riff Police! Pull Over! #141: Savatage Vs Sabaton!

Lawyers all over the globe have their ears trained and their pencils sharpened for our weekly lethal dose of possible plaigarism that we do for s**** and giggles because we can. Don’t go writing in folks, it’s just for fun. You know, what we used to get from going to gigs, crowd surfing and…

Facing the guillotine this week are two surprisingly similar songs with two epic music videos. Back in 1989, multi instrumentalist Jon Oliva saw Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Phantom of The Opera in Toronto and inspired by it, he took his band Savatage in a more Progressive direction for their fifth studio album “Gutter Ballad“. The title track saw heavy rotation on MTV with a video filmed at the beginning of 1990 in New York. Fast forward the better part of two decades to 2008 and “The Art Of War“, the fourth studio album from Swedish Metal act Sabaton. It’s lone single “Cliffs of Gallipoli” is exhibit A in these proceedings, apparently inked by vocalist Joakim Brodén and bassist Par Sundström. The similarities between the pair are there for all to hear and not even producer Peter Tägtgren (Pain, Hypocrisy, Lindemann) noticed when it was recorded at his studio, The Abyss.