Music News

[davidn]

I had forgotten just how amazing Sonata Arctica's "Reckoning Night" was. Even though I thought it lacked some of the speed of their earlier albums at first (apart from the remarkably Weballergy-like "Ain't Your Fairytale"), it grew on me eventually. "White Pearl, Black Oceans" is still among the best and most powerful songs that I've ever heard. Perhaps what I've heard of the even more new-styled "Unia" will grow on me yet, but I can't really see it happening - Sonata Arctica may have started off being a Stratovarius rip-off, but that was what they were good at - and in this decade they've been rather better at being Stratovarius than Stratovarius were.

Speaking of Finland's pioneering metal band, they seem to be in trouble at the moment. Most of this is due to Timo Tolkki, who is rapidly becoming the Prince Philip of the power metal universe in his ability to say increasingly stupid things whenever he opens his mouth. (Choice example: "You foreigners should once listen to metal sung in Finnish".) This interview in particular has to be seen to be believed, reading more like a scene from Spinal Tap than anything else. It was written shortly after their announcement of a change of direction in 2004. Their bassist also proved that he could do it if he really tried, with the comment "I don´t know about the reaction, I have been drinking Jack Daniels for the whole week".

A couple of years ago the band managed to get Timo Kotipelto back from his catastrophically dreadful solo career to record a catastrophically dreadful album with Stratovarius again. A pecularity of this album was that it was about the band themselves (hence being self-titled even though it was their tenth album) apart from one certain song in the middle - Götterdammerung. According to Tolkki, he had originally planned for this song to be called "Hitler", but hadn't considered that that might not go down too well with their record company... in Berlin. And I imagine that saying "I wrote a song called Hitler because I am extremely interested in him" is fairly high on the list of "Things not to say in interviews if you don't want to seem dangerously mental". According to him, the latest album was recorded completely wrongly and he wants to make a return to the old style - and surprisingly, from looking at this Youtube video, it seems that he just might have got something back. (Kotipelto's voice always sounds rather a lot better than that on the albums.)

Silent Force have somehow slipped another album out under my radar - "Walk the Earth" has been available since the beginning of the year and I never realized (parly due to their rubbish website). Some of the lyrics have already been put on Darklyrics, and it seems that DC Cooper's talent for writing songs that make no sense has not diminished despite the three-year gap. And in what might be called an original choice of subject, the traditional fast-paced opening track slot is filled with a song about dying in a car crash. Now that I come to think of it, having a band with "Silent" in the name is a bit weird no matter what.

And I still haven't got around to getting Iron Savior's "Megatropolis" yet (albums from this type of band are even rarer in America than in Britain, and most online stores seem only to have the superior-but-expensive Japanese versions). With this release it looks like Piet is continuing the transition away from a storyline-based band, which was a fantastic gimmick but is a fair enough choice if he wants to be able to write lyrics more freely. After all, there are only so many times you can blow up the Earth in one storyline (three at the last count, as it happens). But this time, I think he's gone as far as permanently writing the Iron Savior itself out, which I genuinely found quite disappointing.

Comments

[e-to-the-ipi.livejournal.com]

That's a brilliant interview, though the interviewer does seem about as self-aware as the band - in particular, this does seem like an odd line to ask along:

"Are you still going to therapy?

TT: I quit that, but now I think I have to go back there. Perhaps start taking antidepressive medication again. This whole thing might make the whole band enter group therapy. I heard there is really good group therapist in Germany, who is specialized in problems of rock groups.

Besides I am facing 1,5 Million Dollars lawsuit from Sanctuary, so it´s all downhill for me now anyway.

You saw your father commiting suicide when you were just 12 years old. Have you gotten over that? "

I really hope that's just some poor translation.

[kjorteo]

At this point, I can safely say the first half of Unia has grown on me. I think its biggest weakness is that it's so front-loaded; it starts off very strong and has all its best songs almost immediately, then seems to run out of steam for the second half. Of the first eight songs, everything except the seventh ("The Vice") has managed to grow beyond just being tracks on the CD and be impressive as actual stand-alone songs, in the way that most of Sonata Arctica's best work does. However, they start to get less interesting starting at track 9 ("The Harvest,") and continue to go downhill. Track 12 ("Fly with the Black Swan") is the most blatant forgettable filler track I've heard since "Picturing the Past" on Ecliptica. At least "Good Enough is Good Enough" is better and the "Out in the Fields" is pretty decent, so it doesn't end on such a bleak note, but it is kind of hard to listen to an entire album (which is what I like doing, rather than mixing them up on Pandora or something) when you think "Okay, that was the last good song, now for a half-hour or so of random junk...."

The weird thing is that filler tracks seem to be rare, at least for me. I mean, consider Avantasia's "The Metal Opera, Part II," which got heavily criticized for front-loading like that on account of putting the biggest masterpiece breakthrough track of the album (the 14-minute, most-of-cast-including, two-guitar-solo-having, wholly epic "The Seven Angels") as track 1. Sure, that may be hard to top, but I actually liked every song on that album on its own merit, so I'm consistently able to enjoy listening to the whole album in one sitting without thinking of any of it as filler. Unia, though...I don't know. I guess what I'm trying to say is that "The Harvest" through "Fly with the Black Swan" are particularly weak for Sonata Arctica songs.

[kjorteo]

*The "Out in the Fields" cover is pretty decent. I hate when random words disappear like that.