?Classic? of metal: AMORPHIS - Tales From The Thousand Lakes (1994), additional listens

One of the more challenging music writing exercises I attempt on this blog is an explanation of why I don't really click with music that's doing a lot of things well.  The traps include spouting unsupported subjective opinions as though they're fact, "supporting" subjective opinions with a boring list of "evidence" as though explanation of taste could be proved, or falling into boring rhetorical patterns.  I feel like there's a lot of "I just don't feel this" in my writing.  I further worry that too many of my reviews end up devolving into "I don't want to just be critical, and I kind of like this, but... [list of things I dislike]" that end up sounding more negative than I want.  I hate to write that way, but, here's a list of things I don't like about Tales From A Thousand Lakes...

Yeah, I'm not mad at Tales, but I'd be lying if I said I was feeling it.  Normally when not for blogging purposes I have a three-listen system.  If a record makes enough of a "there's something here" impression, it gets a second spin - sometimes weeks later, because that's just how I work.  If I'm actively liking it after two, it gets a third, and after three it either becomes a candidate for more runthroughs (and my year-end list!) or I bid it farewell.  Tales would not in a million years have qualified for a fourth listen were I not trying to find things to say about it.  That fourth listen (and beyond to hear a few more things) was a slog for me.  I am anxious to be done listening to and thinking about this record now.

Compared to my original impressions, major changes are these:  first, I've moved away from thinking of Tales as basically a good '80s thrash record sans a quality vocalist.  To be clear, I remain a vocal melody whore as exhaustively detailed, and everything I wrote in my previous post about my relationship with death growls still applies.  For this particular record, I'm convinced the problem is not the death metal in and of itself, so much as the performance.  In a roundabout way I came to realize this when casually pulling up some later Amorphis songs to get a sense of the band's evolution over time as they leaned into the folk-metal.  The clean vocals - on this record and elsewhere - really aren't particularly captivating to me either.  If anything, Tomi Koivusaari is the more charismatic singer.  One can absolutely do a vocal that has hooks in a death metal style.  Amorphis, however, are unable or unwilling to provide that.

Besides the vocals, three other issues worth highlighting that I think act as barriers to my enjoyment:

1)  Production

I'm not an audiophile and can't talk too intelligently about this, but listen to "Thousand Lakes."  At least on the particular stream/mix I'm playing it from, it's gorgeous.  The piano is loud and clear, neatly cradled by the ethereal chanting and background sounds, especially that tinkly element that comes in at 1:00 in.  Seemingly all brutal metal records have the quiet pretty intro track, but this one is legitimately great.  Then listen to how "Into Hiding" starts.  Suddenly the music sounds distant, and you have to turn up the volume to think of the guitars as powerful rather than background.  Not only is Tomi not conveying passion to me, he's buried enough in the mix that I don't know if any vocal performance could.  I can't hear the drums as a crisp click so much as, well, part of a thin unimpressive wall of noise.  Maybe it's just the times.  Maybe only metal bands that were Metallica-big could afford big-rock production until the mid-2000s or so.  Whatever it is, it's a big factor here.

2)  Composition

Maybe part of the reason I keep Tales at arms length is how hard prog-metal is to get right.  Many songs on Tales have good bits, and "The Castaway" most certainly has them.  How do they come together, though?  You have an energetic intro leading into an arresting "main" riff.  Then that drops away into a fairly straightforward riff with a fairly straightforward verse.  That's... okay, I guess.  And then Tomi just snarls a bunch, and we have a "chorus" built around an only slightly more interesting up and down guitar pattern.  That awesome main riff does come back at three minutes in, and then goes away again forever.  Then the song goes into a slow screechy organ interlude, and then back to fairly generic metal, and then the last thirty seconds or so introduce a fretwork-heavy guitar solo that neatly fits in with what came before.  

So, I like a few riffs, and I like the intro and the outro.  I'm not feeling the progression from one idea to the next, or how it all fits together.  It's a decent track.  I highlight it here because I think a few more rewrites could have been the basis for an all-time classic, which in my mind, it is not.

"Black Winter Day" dabbles in being a keyboard driven folky number until it's not, and drops in its second vocalist for what could have been a hook that uses it as a bridge.  Like so many tracks here, BWD feels like a series of bridges between where the hooks are supposed to be.

3)  Drums

I'm not a drummer and can talk less intelligently about it than I can about production.  Most of the times I notice Jan Rechberger, it's to note how basic the drumming sounds.  All on the downbeat, ba-BOOM, ba-BOOM, and then a mid-measure beat here and there.  I wish I paid more attention to drums in all forms of music, although in rock it's kinda by design.  Ringo Starr is, I guess, considered a true great because he knows how to keep perfect time and how not to get in the way of a song.  Rock drummers mostly stand out either if they can't keep time (not good!), or if they're a Peart-level virtuoso who can elevate a song whilst feeling like part of it (good!).  Jan does not stand out to me, for better or for worse.  There are some fancy fills, especially on "The Castaway" and "Forgotten Sunrise," and they do not stand out.  I just kinda wonder if someone either with more technical skill or more of a sense of swing/groove could have given these songs that extra push to make them better versions of themselves.

In the name of mixing in mention of the good things about the record - and I continue to assure you, there are certainly good things about the record even for my tastes.  Let's list some favorite bits!

- the bits of "The Castaway" I mentioned, the one riff and the mini guitar solo

- The harmonic Smiths-style keyboard accents that come in around 2:25 of "First Doom"

- "Drowned Maid."  The whole thing.

- The breakdown the end of "In The Beginning"

- Coming up with the right volume for the in-the-mix vocals of "To Father's Cabin"

- The screechy guitar notes in the intro to "Magic And Mayhem"

- The back and forth between the two distinct tones of "Magic And Mayhem," with the keyboard coming in and out to highlight it

No, seriously, let's get back to "Drowned Maid."  Pretty clearly my favorite track on the record not because it's different so much as because it's successful at the things the other tracks attempt.  The tempo change keeps the riffage interesting.  What I'm calling the chorus ("waters of the sea," etc) is a legit catchy vocal melody* paired with a memorable guitar line.  Then observe how the first time the chorus transitions into the "let not my brother..." bit there's a few lines of riffage as the song distinctly slows down, but it goes from that right back into the chorus, and then directly back into the other part with some incredibly smooth key changes, like each phrase completes the other.  "Drowned Maid" has distinct parts that fit together into something bigger.  As I said, I don't think the intent is any different than elsewhere on the record.  "Forgotten Sunrise" also speeds up and slows down and transitions between different parts... just not as well.

Other comments:

- I suppose I should mention the choice to build a record around episodes from Kalevala, often described as "the Finnish national epic."  I'm not familiar with the folklore or poetry at all.  But look, first, knowing the source material shouldn't be an entry point to listening to the record, and second, with most of the lyrics being incomprehensible even when one has the lyrics called up... well, I'm glad the poem is meaningful to the guys in the band, but when the Internet can't even always agree on which songs are based on which parts, well, seems pretty inessential.  Too bad, though, since I'd like to understand the context of the two characters in "Magic And Mayhem" in particular. 

 

- I don't think I'll be diving deep into Amorphis's catalogue, but I will say that when my streaming service randomly played me "Message In The Amber," I was impressed.  The triumphant power metal adjacent riffs land, the echoey production gives the song some weight, and the interplay between the two vocalists makes me like them way better than I'd like either individually.  To the extent that any Amorphis is my jam, I guess Queen Of TIme era?

- I don't regret my time with Tales.  Now, will I ever want to listen to any of these songs again?  Maybe.  Maybe not, honestly.  "Drowned Maid," "Magic And Mayhem," and "Black Winter Night" are the main candidates, in that order.

- My initial thought was that I should combine my initial reactions and later brief updates into one post, to prevent me not having anything new to say in the follow-up "yeah, I listened some more, still not my favorite" post.  But I think I did actually come up with something that isn't a recapitulation of the last post.  So I'm going to stick with this format for my next metal project.  Next, I leave the death growls behind for awhile and instead attempt to get my head around why I appreciate yet can't quite come to actually love the sub-genre of power metal.

Favorite track:  "Drowned Maid"

Runner up:  "Magic And Mayhem"

Least favorite track:  "First Doom"

Rating:  2.5/5

On to an exploration of some of the "?Classics? Of Power Metal," whenever I get around to it!

*it helps that I can actually understand the words!  Maybe Tomi's idea of playing a vulnerable, feminine role is singing a little more comprehensibly than normal?