Wintersun, Arsis, Thesis

My roommate recently discovered one of the songs from Wintersun’s new (?) album thanks to YouTube recommendations off of his workout playlist. He loved it and I started playing some old Wintersun as well to intro him to the good stuff. Oh my, it brings back memories of late nights at Brown coding and walking to catch up with Olivia so we can hit up Loui’s at 5 AM for grilled pumpkin muffins.

Wintersun is one of those clasic Finnish metal bands in the same vein as Children of Bodom, Kalmah, Eternal Tears of Sorrow - heavy use of keyboards. I think of them as aesthetic descendants of Stratovarius.

The themes are often a bit dark, fantasy power metal-ish. It’s different from the Dragonforce style of very American speed-for-speed, brutality-for-brutalty. There’s a whole article brewing in me about showiness and American culture and how Texans and Nigerians and Punjabis and Andhras share in some of these cultural stereotypes as well, but that’s for another blog post. One that I will never write.

Wintersun is attempting to make something a bit more emotional with their music and I do feel like they succeed. There is a frisson I get when I listen to their songs, especially their first album - and some of that is certainly nostalgia. But I remember also being hooked on these songs back at Brown, so there was something interesting about them even then.

Unfortunately, I am not as into their newest album - a riff on Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, with prog-rock level structures. The album is four songs of 14 minutes each and well, listen, I just don’t like change very much, OK? I like my Wintersun Wintersun-y and if I wanted to spend 4 minutes developing a theme that only pays off 3 minutes later, I would listen to Porcupine Tree, Opeth, or Arsis’s incredible thesis (hehe) A Diamond for Disease. Wintersun is clearly composed of solid musical talent but I cannot enjoy the excessive amount of atonality before the release in their latest album.

The English is also constructed a bit awkwardly. They don’t have a Finnish accent when they sing but the word choices are a bit odd or flow weirdly. Everything else about the music - the vocals both clean and death are great. The instrumentation and production are of course world-class. But the lyrics and excessive time to set-up the release of a musical phrase is a bit too much.

A band that does this incredibly well - keeping you entertained through the formation of the arsis and the conclusion of the thesis is…Arsis, the same one I linked above. They’re amazing and I go back occasionally to listen to their work and just sit flabbergasted by the complexity and construction and execution of their work. Truly a masterstroke. Their new stuff is more commercial and cleanly produced but retains their energy and complexity really well. I only included this paragraph so it doesn’t look like I hate things that are new. To be clear, I do.