Amorphis, Under a red cloud

Amorphis is one of those bands that you either love for giving up “that death metal shit” and starting to play something more intelligible, either hate for turning mainstream when they were able to produce such a wonderful Tales from the Thousand Lakes. With Under a red cloud it almost looks like they’re trying to please both sides, but when the two sides are irreconcilable, the result is a somewhat incoherent record, with sparkling highs and murky lows. 

The albums starts off nicely, with a pleasant and melodious title track, that’s definitely not lacking power. It almost reminds me a bit of Crematory’s Farewell letter. 

The Four Wise Ones sounds like the old Amorphis, with a well-defined melodic death metal, sprinkled with some nice folk themes. I didn’t expect much from it (other than satisfying my nostalgia, that is), but the song grows, evolves and surprises in a very nice way. 

Bad Blood starts with some grabbing riffs and lovely keyboards carrying the tune, but apparently two and a half good songs in a row were enough for this album and it was time for the murk to appear. This is my biggest problem with Under the red cloud, that in the middle of all the death, there’s a ladidadida appearing exactly out of nowhere. A cheesy chorus, that has no connection whatsoever to the rest of the song and it’s a recipe you will find repeated throughout most of the record. 

The Skull does it again, starting off in an aggressive way, and then going all light and mellow. I love changes of rhythm in the course of a single song, I’m a sucker for soft emotional parts, I like Tomi’s clean vocals, I appreciate his versatility, but in my opinion neither of them is well used here. It’s sudden, anti-climatic and it leaves me with a “when and why did this happen?” confusion. 

The beginning of Death of a King is probably my favourite part of this album, with a terribly engaging  headbanging material, coupled with an oriental theme on the background. The clean vocals that follow  immediately after that are well connected to the rest of the song and flow naturally from it, proof that it can be done, but then they go even further with the clean vocals and reach that dreaded point of cheesiness yet again. It doesn’t really help that the chorus sounds so much like the one from The Skull that I actually checked to see if it’s one single very long and entwined song. It wasn’t, it was just lack of inspiration. 

Sacrifice sounds like a happier Paradise Lost, for the most part, and I almost like this more than the previous songs because here I at least know where I stand: it’s an enjoyable tame song, that doesn’t trick me with harsh vocals and aggressive riffs and then serves me a plate of sugar. 

Dark Path, however, quickly goes back to the “good grunting verse + questionable light chorus” recipe. And when a person like myself (meaning someone who generally prefers clean vocals and heartfelt music) is more excited by the growls and aggressiveness, then I dare say we have a problem. The feeling that I’ve heard it all before isn’t very welcoming either. 

Enemy at the Gates is really good, especially compared to the rest of the album. The clean vocals are well used this time, intense and with an interesting  touch of oriental, the sudden brutal insertion of the growls almost made me wince, the progressive instrumental bridge is lovely, the keyboard solo is one of those sparkling highs I was talking about, it has purpose, it has feeling… that’s the Amorphis I like.

The streak of good songs continues with Tree of Ages, that’s so folky and chipper and animated, I can’t help but think how awesome it will be during live concerts. 

White Night starts off intriguingly with an atmospheric verse sung by a ghostly sensual female voice, continues with a cold harsh bridge with grunts and a purposely repetitive guitar riff that creates burden and a beautiful Opeth-like instrumental interlude. What’s not to like? Well, the never missing cheese-ex-machina choir, for one thing. The feeling that someone rolled the dice on the order of these otherwise distinct four parts of the song, maybe? How about the fact that I cannot understand for the life of me how they can be so good one second and then do a complete 180 turn and do something that makes you scratch your head and wonder if you weren’t listening to another band a second ago. 

Come the Spring sounds like a a darker Sonata Arctica. My opinion is that the only thing good about Sonata Arctica is Tony Kakko and he’s not here. 

Winter’s Sleep is beautiful and I have no idea why it’s a bonus track when it’s better than 90% of the things included on the album, but nevertheless I’m glad I had a chance to hear it because it’s everything I missed while listening to the previous tracks. Great clean vocals from Tomi, good transitions from clean to harsh and back, inspiring instrumentals and, most of all, an enchanting atmosphere. Emotion, intensity, sorrow and a dash of hope and light, the perfect Finnish ballad. 

Like I said, sparkling highs and murky lows. It seems that they cannot decide what they want to do and be, constantly pendulating between the old melodic death Amorphis and the new lighter one. Neither is bad, actually, but the association of the two is less than happy and leads to some dubious combinations that don’t represent complexity and versatility, but rather incoherence and indecisiveness. What’s worse is that I miss that touch of northern sadness mixed with northern fantasy and adventure that their old albums used to have. I absolutely adore folk music and have always been fascinated by these lands and Amorphis translated their identity into music in such a beautiful and powerful way, but on this album there’s so little of that. Change is ok, but only when it’s for the better and sadly, I don’t think this is the case. What they lost seems more important to me than what they found.