Aki's Blog

I was born in 1992, and if I could choose I wouldn’t change it for a second. Sure, I was only four when Therion released Theli, considered one of the earliest symphonic metal albums, and I was only six when Nightwish released Oceanborn in 1998, but I have lived to witness the release of many great albums since the mid-2000′s.

This is what I concider the golden age of symphonic metal. Right here, right now. It is a genre that develop well on its own as well as into other genres – Leaves’ Eyes blend it perfectly with folk music (Njord of 2009 for example) and Sonata Arctica earlier this fall released The Days of Grays which was the first album that really showed a mixture of power, prog and symphonic metal without one taking the overly control.

A certain cliff in the history of symphonic metal was released only a month ago… Epica‘s Design Your Universe is the album I will speak of today.

This phenomenal, epic, melodic, bombastic album kicks of with their best instrumental yet, the intro song Samadhi ~ Prelude ~, before entering Resign to Surrender ~ A New Age Dawns – part IV ~. DYU is the first album to continue the A New Age Dawns saga, first started on the 2005 album Consign to Oblivion. The first three parts told of the collapse of the Mayan civilization, and this 2009 release show the next three parts. To me, Resign to Surrender sounds like an amazing intro song, the perfect way to reawaken the saga in. It builds up perfectly, before finishing and leaving the scene for the next song (and the first video for the album), Unleashed. Unleashed is far from the best song of the album, but I understand they used it as a video. It is a real catchy song, and Simone sounds amazing in it. I can’t see why it’s their most popular on Last.fm, but still a great track.

The fourth song on the album is Martyr of the Free Word, and here I must speak my mind. Why, oh why, couldn’t this be the third song? I would much prefer it to be ahead of Unleashed, simply because Unleashed is a bit too grande and bombastic, whilst Martyr is more of a metal song. Resign to Surrender followed by Unleashed just doesn’t sound as good as followed by Martyr of the Free Word. This aside, it’s a really cool track, one of the more special on the album, with influences from oriental music in the vocal lines. Mark Jansen’s grunts right after the chorus really is an amazing part that does the song.

The next song is another more bombastic one – Our Destiny. I’m sad to say this is one of the weaker songs on the album, if I have to choose one. It is a great song, but compared to the rest of the album it’s kind of dull. The thing is that it’s too long… it’s only 6 minutes, not much to Epica standards, but I feel it’s a little too much. If it were to be cut down into at least 4:40, 5, it would be much higher in my ratings.

Kingdom of Heaven ~ A New Age Dawns – part V ~ is the fifth chapter of the A New Age Dawns saga, and the longest song on the album at 13:35. It is an awesome track, especially the first eight minutes, but it’s still a disappointment to me. Maybe I had too high hopes – before I heard it I saw an interview with Mark Jansen explaining how he had worked on the song for three years, and how he considered it their best by far. To me it’s pretty low on the list of top tracks on DYU, after the title track, Martyr of the Free Word, Burn to a Cinder, and Resign to Surrender. As with Our Destiny, maybe this song would be much better if it were to be cut down, maybe with as much as three or four minutes. Another remark is the spoken parts in the second half of the song… I don’t mind cheese, in fact I order a triple cheese sandwich listening to Stratovarius and Rhapsody of Fire, but these spoken parts really shift the song from epic to humorous, not a completely reparable damage I’m afraid.

After an epic song like Kingdom of Heaven, it’s often tough to hear another song right away. Many bands solve this problem with either putting an easier rock song right after (Nightwish‘s The Poet and the Pendulum was followed by Bye Bye Beautiful), or the epic song is the final track on the album. The dilemma here is how there are two epic songs, Kingdom of Heaven as well as the title track, which is put as the final song (a perfect choice, more of that later). So the choice was to have an interlude as the seventh track, entitled The Price of Freedom ~ Interlude ~, a clip of people speaking of the price of freedom being death and orchestral music in the background resembling of many horror pictures from the 1920′s.

The interlude leads elegantly into Burn to a Cinder, one of my favorites on the album. It is one of the more melodic songs, going back to the power metal territories of Consign to Oblivion and The Phantom Agony. The song ends with an epic moment leading into deep sorrow (“Why can’t I bleed with you?”) followed by the album’s first ballad, the moving Tides of Time.

To me, both Deconstruct and Semblance of Liberty are pretty standard symph metal songs – no big surprises, catchy choruses, nothing really special except for the speaking part in Semblance of Liberty (“Read… my… lips”).

The second ballad of the album is also the weakest song Epica has ever made. I was glad when they announced that Tony Kakko of Sonata Arctica would guest feature on the song White Waters, but this doesn’t feel like Tony at all. All Tony touches turns to gold, but this is as far from gold as you could get. White Waters is not beautiful, it is boring and weird, and the only thing that saves it is that Semblance of Liberty leading into the final track of the album would be very weird. And the final track is gold.

Design Your Universe ~ A New Age Dawns – part VI ~ is the best song Epica has ever written, and that’s final. It is just perfect, from it’s epic chorus (“We can’t undo what we have done, so show us now what we’ve become”) to its final, heartbreaking, whispering verse that always makes me weep.

This is Epica’s best release to date, and I’m really excited if they will ever top it, because let’s face it…. this is the latest chapter in the history of awesome music.

How do I feel on religion? I am not Christian, nor Muslim or Satanist. I am simply not religious – but I have nothing against religion. The thing is that people take religion so damn serious. To me (and I may offend someone), religion is just a mythology among the rest. The Norse mythology once was a religion like Christendome is today. But for some reason people don’t like to see Norse or Egyptian or Roman mythology as a religion. If I would say I believe in the Almighty Thor, they would laugh. I can’t see the difference. Christianity’s main point is that a person called Jesus Christ was born from a virgin, and raised learning he was the Son of God. He performed miracles and tried to help man kind, and then man kind killed him. To me, this is a nice story, but then the weird things start to happen – he raise from the dead, and goes up to heaven with daddy. Sure, people can believe this, I don’t mind… and I also very well know that Christianity is about so much more, it’s about being nice to eachother, turning the other cheek… these are all ideas I share. But why do you have to call it a religion? Can’t you just say that it’s good to behave nicely? I don’t think anyone disagrees on that.

The thing is, that IF this is a truth and not just a bunch of stories – why do so many people believe it? How did they find out? What are the odds that EVERYONE writing the Bible told truths and not fairy tales, or for that matter rumours? The Bible was not written by God, I try to tell believers, it was written by men. I believe in science, but if I found a 2000 year old book telling me 1 + 1 = 5 I wouldn’t believe it just because. Nor would I if it said in the book that it was Albert Einstein who had said it, because he was born 1900 years later and it wouldn’t make any sense.

To finish off by quoting Epica: “Follow your common sense, you cannot hide yourself behind a fairy tale forever”.

Every day, I get about 6500 hits for one single post on this blog: “Simone Simons infected by MSRA“, mainly for that damn pic. The second most popular is the main page, with circa 500(!). I don’t mind, it brings quite a lot of people to my blog. I did a search on Simone Simons on Google just a minute ago, and that picture on this site is the first hit! I didn’t think it was that big. Hihi, cool. So now I know how to get audience here: Hot metal singers!

Goddamnit… From Epica’s offical website:

“After having had a couple of weeks of rest we were very much hoping that Simone’s situation would have improved already. Unfortunately the last MRSA test was still positive and also the infections still haven’t stopped completely. We have the feeling Simone’s health is improving but unfortunately not enough yet. We cannot risk the health of Simone and therefore, with pain in our hearts, we cannot come to Mexico and Colombia again. Also two of our three shows in the UK are cancelled for this reason. It’s still impossible for Simone to make long trips. As you can imagine we feel really bad about this, especially since our Mexican/Colombian tour was already postponed once before, but we also hope you understand and respect our decision on this. You all have our word that we will come back as soon as possible to make up for all this. Unfortunately at this moment we just can’t tell when this will be but we hope before the end of this year.“

Dutch symphonic metal band Epica will be performing a classical show with symphonic orchestra and choir in the Miskolc International Opera Festival, in Hungary on the fourth of June 14, 2008. On this concert, which they call “The Classical Conspiracy” (from their latest album’s title), Epica and the orchestrea will perform classical pieces from Mozart, Dvorak, Verdi, Orff, Prokofiev, Grieg, Vivaldi in new metal adaptions, as well as symphonic versions of Epica songs. They have also promised “other surprises as well”. Seriously, if you can, GO! Please? Just to film the whole shit? I wish I could but since this is in Hungary and I live in Sweden I guess it’s too far. They will probably film it for a DVD release though… Hihihi…

More information: www.epica.nl

Symphonic metal band Epica’s singer Simone Simons is infected with MSRA, a difficultly treated disease, and they have been forced to cancel all the February shows. This is nothing that affects me as I had no plans in seeing them during February, but I’m still worried to death for the sake of this beautiful singer’s health. I hope you get better soon, Simons!

Source: Epica’s official site

In 2004, Finnish symphonic power metal band Nightwish released their fifth studio album, Once, leading to a giant world tour. After the last concert, the members of Nightwish wrote an open letter which officially fired the lead singer, Tarja Turunen, leading to a giant debate; the name of Nightwish have become famous because of the operatic female vocals creating the new genre \”symphonic power metal\” – so without Tarja, is their a Nightwish? In the fall of 2006, Nightwish surprised their fans and reporters all around the world by announcing the possibility of sending in a demo tape to the Nightwish members. Thousands of applicants sent their demos to Nightwish, and in February 2007, lead member, main composer and keyboardist Tuomas Holopainen announced that the new member was found.

On May 25, Nightwish officially released their new single, Eva, a radio single which was sold as download only. All the income goes to a child charity. Though, already as I got home from school yesterday, a leak had made the song downloadable on The Pirate Bay. I don\’t really know if I should take that as good or bad, but I guess bad. I mean, the song should have been released TOMORROW. Goddamn it, wait one day at least!

The identity of the new vocalist wasn\’t leaked, however. Her identity was officially revealed on Nightwish.com yesterday at 5 pm Finnish time (4 pm Swedish time, 2 pm American). I was glad to hear that the singer, Anette Olzon (birth name Anette Blyckert) wasn\’t very famous at all; according to Nightwish.com, Google searches and Wikipedia, she had joined a band as a teenager, Alyson Avenue which she still was a member of before Nightwish. The band had only released two albums and they never got very famous. So why am I glad to hear that? Actually, I must confess that I had started to believe those bloody tabloids, and I really thought that the singer would turn out to be Simone Simons of Epica, Lady Angellyca of Forever Slave etcetera. For the first thing, this would be quite boring. No new blood. I already know these voices. Two: this would perhaps mean that the new singer already is famous, perhaps even more famous than the other members, casting shade on them, taking over totally and turning Nightwish into another band. I don\’t want that to happen, I want Tuomas to hold the control of the band, keep composing their songs and being the front member. And the third and last reason: I want to see a brand new artist develop. I really think that I think the same as the members thought choosing to have a demo outtake instead of asking famous singers of other metal bands. I want to see a girl (okay, she\’s 35, so woman) develop from being non-famous into being one of the world\’s most famous singers of the metal genre. And I think that Anette Olzon has got that competence. I really do.

Over to my analysis of the song itself; no more talk about Anette and Nightwish\’s last years. Eva begins with a calm piano play in twenty seconds, before Anette\’s voice appears and calmly introduces the songs, with the piano repeating itself in the background. The refrain begins after 56 seconds: \”Eva flies away, dreams the world far away. In this cruel children\’s game, there\’s no friend to call her name\”. Something already destroying Nightwish\’s nature of before is Anette\’s humming; actually, my thoughts of humming aren\’t that great. I look at humming as a cheap way of \”singing\” instead of using some other instruments to make the sound. Another similar thing that reminds (oh, god, can I really say this about Nightwish?) of pop is Anette\’s voice at 04:01, her drawn out version of the word \”sunflower seed\” (okay, I suck at hearing lyrics and I can\’t find the official lyrics, so it\’s possibly not \”sunflower seed\”). I hate that. Please. Don\’t use that beautiful voice of yours for humming and similar.

At the end first refrain, at about 01:30 of the song, no drums have been used, and as I can hear nothing but piano and calm singing. The song is really calm, but due to experience, I can say that metal songs can\’t do totally calm songs. They can\’t live without drums and electric guitars, and I don\’t blame them. I love calm, sad songs, but they are rather boring if the tempo all the song through is the same, and if the only instrument is the piano. I compare with for example Sonata Arctica\’s Shamandalie and Evanescence\’s My Immortal. Calm metal songs. I love them. Eva don\’t ruin this tradition, introducing drums at 02:12 (which follows through till the end), and the song has got an electric guitar solo at 02:52. At 03:38, a louder refrain with drums, piano, electric guitars and backing vocals appears and goes till the end of the song, at 04:24.

After listening to Eva, I am every time surprised about its length. The song really has it all; introduction, piano solo, electric guitar solo, it is calm, it is hard, it has it all. On less than four and a half minute.