DC metalcore favorites getting back together had me as giddy as a school girl. But the three good tunes here are no match for the rest of the album’s tragedies.
Like Paradise Lost, Amorphis seems bent on encompassing their catalogue and compressing it into diamonds of progressive, note-dense, mostly quite heavy tracks.
Beginning life as a poisonous black metal cabal, moving through luminous, magical industrial metal, through too much techno, and now, back to a heavy medium.
Sung and recorded better than a Sentenced album, but every time the verse starts, you’re bored. Stodgy, oppressive songs which, in the end, aren’t that heavy.
The best of their past, combined with new, forward-looking tricks to become something flawless. Fresh, nostalgic, beefy, futuristic, classic, and catchy.
Emotion worn on the hearts of their white, frilly sleeves, Sonata Arctica sometimes get too close to maudlin. On the more orchestral side of the catalogue.
You hear about Dave the Christian, but he’s also an intense American, addictive, and he’s angry (again), and a student of rotten politics, conspiracies, and the flow of the money. A lethal combination.
Helmed by former Naglfar vocalist Jens Ryden. The guitars are set at hyper speed, slaying with such mind-numbing velocity their sound, occasionally gets buried.