Review: Nightwish - Imaginaerum

Imaginaerum is the first Nightwish album in four years. It is a bold concept album. It is a movie. It is experimental. It is almost certainly not what you’re expecting. More than anything, it is a clear case of the devilish specter of ambition grabbing hold of the creator and dragging him into new depths faster than he can keep up. Imaginaerum is a lot of things, but the one thing it isn’t is the one it needs to be most - a cohesive album that satisfies from start to finish.

Uncertainty set in the moment I glanced at the track listing. “I Want My Tears Back”? “Turn Loose the Mermaids”? “Scaretale”? Who in their right mind let Tuomas label his creations with these hideous titles?

Nightwish has always been a band best experienced with no knowledge of the lyrical content, and Imaginaerum is no different, so let us continue to more important matters.  

“Taikatalvi” leads in with a hauntingly simple melody and the band adventurously deciding to lead in with their native language. One can’t help but take a quick glance at those track titles and wish they did this more often. “Taikatalvi” is undoubtedly beautiful, but there’s not enough here to satisfy. As with most pointless intro tracks, it ends right as its momentum builds to a peak, a great idea without a proper song to contain it.

Transitioning that momentum into lead single “Storytime” doesn’t do Imaginaerum any favors. Annette’s screechy vocals and the bored choirs ooh-ing in the background give off a decidedly lazy single vibe. “Storytime” is almost conspicuously generic, as if Nightwish knew they needed a traditional lead single to sell the album but their heart wasn’t in it. This is Nightwish composed by checklist, a feeling that slips into many of the band’s efforts to capture their more traditional sound on the album. It feels out of place among Imaginaerum’s wild experiments. 

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Within Temptation - The Unforgiving Review

Within Temptation have managed to carve out a healthy reputation for themselves despite the fact that they’re often thought of as “that other band that’s kind of like Nightwish”. Such a categorization is blatantly unfair, of course, as it’s an injustice to the talent of the lead singer and the power of some of the melodies the band has created, but it is at least understandable.

Symphonic metal is a crowded genre. It seems especially popular in a few strange European lands where so many imitators have sprung up all over the place that one imagines the want ads simply overflowing with requests for violinists and choir singers. 

Unfortunately, most of these bands seem to have no idea what makes this style of music compelling in the first place, content to stick with the formula of “big ass choir + big ass string section + repetitive metal music + dumb, melodramatic lyrics = symphonic metal”. There’s precious few unique ideas out there and even fewer bands that get the mix right. It’s not a matter of simply mashing the component elements together. You have to weave them carefully in and out of one another, achieving a delicate balance of soft and hard, metal and melody, epic and personal. 

Nightwish is one of the few bands to consistently achieve this feat. Tuomas Holopainen, the genius behind the Finnish symphonic metal masters, has mastered the creation of songs that deserve the verb “composed” instead of merely being “written”, integrating the melodic and the metal in a way no one else can seem to match. 

With this in mind, placing Within Temptation on a pedestal next to Nightwish is not the insult it might at first appear to be, even if the implication is that the Dutch band plays decidedly second fiddle to the true masters. Within Temptation have historically been good at what they do, but there’s a reason they’re not considered the leader even though their band was actually formed in the same year as Nightwish.

Sharon den Adel and company built their band’s sound on a foundation that could be generously described as “melodramatic”. There was something compelling about the almost absurdly over-the-top nature of their music, but that same quality robbed it of the emotional punch of Tuomas’s compositions. When thinking of Within Temptation, I always conjured the image of a listener sitting alone in a tiny chair in a huge empty room being somehow beaten over the head with an orchestra.

That’s an amusing way of saying that the driving force behind their music has long been choir, strings, and vocals. Everything else has been backgrounded and the result left one wondering why such a band needed two guitarists. It was catchy, generally well done, and fun music, but it was hard to take seriously. 

With The Unforgiving, Within Temptation have managed to evolve their sound into something far more mature and whole without sacrificing any of the fun or epic feel that made them interesting in the first place. The result is undoubtedly the strongest album they have yet released.

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Hellbilly Deluxe 2 - Rob Zombie's Return to Form... Mostly

Okay, so Educated Horses sucked. Rob Zombie fans have had four years to come to terms with that. The stellar American Witch may go down next to Dragula as one of Zombie’s best moments, but it’s also the only memorable thing on the entire album.

Now Rob Zombie is back and he has the audacity to title his next work as a sequel to his most well-known album (if not his best, a title that belongs to The Sinister Urge). 

So is slapping a 2 on the end of Hellbilly Deluxe a blasphemous move or does it manage to channel the dreadlocked Zombie of old?

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