Amorphis
Elegy

For 2 years the Amorphis group was silent after the release of the album Tales from the Thousand Lakes: apparently, the authors of the lyrics, having exhausted their stock of ideas in Kalevala, decided to draw them from Kanteletar - another Finnish folk epic - which they have been doing all this time. A lot of interesting things happened during this time with the composition of the group: firstly, having decided that growling was not at all appropriate for such texts, the team invited a clean vocalist Pasi Koskinen from the little-known Finnish band Saint Mucous, whose voice we can hear. in the overwhelming majority of tracks on the new album (nevertheless, Tomi Koivusaari occasionally manages to break through to the microphone and growl something there ;-)). In addition, both former keyboardists left the group - Kasper Martenson (who generally appeared in its composition only during the recording of Tales from the Thousand Lakes and Black Winter Day EP) and Jan Rechberger, who was also a dramer. The keyboardist was replaced by Kim Rantala, and the drums were taken by Pekka Kasari - both new faces in the Amorphis line-up. The result of all these changes was a significant lightening of the sound with a complete rejection of death and a bias towards a kind of daring post-doom (and even rave motives can be heard in the song Cares). The music has become more technical, there is just a sea of ​​subtle features, so you can listen and listen to Elegy, discovering new facets of musicians' art. Nevertheless, having strengthened its potential with the technique of playing, Amorphis lost the atmosphere for which it was famous before, and this component, in my opinion, is much more important - after all, the Stories of a Thousand Lakes were an example of simplicity and unpretentiousness in technical terms, and at the same time they caught the most subtle soul threads ...