Amorphis Finland

"I really wanted to like this one, and in all fairness, the I think the melodies here are great; I love the use of the Nazareth Arab Orchestra and Hellscore Choir (both of which were utilized by Orphaned Land in their 2018 release as well), and the compositions in general are quite good. Unfortunately, the engineering is absolutely atrocious, even by Bogrens' standards - seriously, this album is one of the worst-sounding I've ever heard, at least I thought so at first? The mastering is actually very inconsistent for some reason. In the middle of the album, I couldn't bear the clipping anymore and had to pause the music for a few minutes for a stimulation break, but by track 9, I was thinking that maybe I somehow misheard the music earlier, or my computer did something to compress it? Because the mastering didn't sound as bad at that point. No. As it turns out, after running a DR test on the album, some songs are literally more compressed than others, making the listening experience not only disorienting, but just uncomfortable. There's no excuse for this. Plain and simple, a half-assed master and overdone mixing such that everything clashes with each other. This really could have been decent, too. It's just frustrating to ruin otherwise good music like this... nice orchestrations, good use of harmonics, and memorable melodies. Why not brickwall it and make it unbearable?"

"This album really grew on me after each listen during the past two months. The major improvement here is clearly the vocals, with much more nuances than on the previous album. Musically it is close to their last release "Eclipse", with the same blend of folk and power metal with a touch of death metal (mainly the growls). A bit more extreme in times (more growls are used on this release, sometimes successfully like on the first two tracks, sometimes out of place like on "Towards and Against" or "The White Swan"), a bit mellower in other times (out of ten songs, four are power ballads and one, "Enigma", is a pure folkish acoustic tune)."

"One of the good surprises of 2006...

Another release with lyrics based on traditionnal finnish folklore. The structure of the songs is here more classic with verses and choruses, and even growled vocals make a small return (fortunately used sparingly). Keyboardist Santeri Kallio has become a full time member and even contributed actively to the songwriting. The music itself is stronger than on the previous release, with powerful and catchy songs...

The new singer uses three types of voice: melodic (usually on verses), low rumbling/power voice (usually on choruses) and growls... and it fits the music perfectly.

Highly recommended."