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Wintersun - Wintersun CD (album) cover

WINTERSUN

Wintersun

 

Tech/Extreme Prog Metal

3.75 | 108 ratings

From Progarchives.com, the ultimate progressive rock music website

CCVP
Prog Reviewer
2 stars Cheese, permafrost and metal

This album is boring as hell, but it has its moments and that is why i am giving it a two star grade instead of an one star grade: i like to worth everything that is in an album. However this one don't have too many qualities to number, but an one star seemed unfair anyway. Actually, i have never thought i would have been so turned off by an extreme metal album ever.

Before i start my review i like to be clear about 1 thing: i like extreme metal and power metal (well, at least good extreme metal and power metal) and this album seems to bring the worst of the two worlds: the repetitive riffs of black / death metal on a 5 minute song that should have only 2-4 minutes top; the 'epic' overdubbed vocals (à lá Blind Guardian) are completely out of place and the raw growling vocals easily outshines the 'epic' vocals in most tracks; the restless and aggressive black metal drums also ruin the 'epic' feeling. This album feels like a bad mixture of Blind Guardian, Dragonforce and the Immortal album At the heart of Winter.

As i said before, there are good things. The clear tracks (the ones that are not 'extreme'), like Death and the Healing and Sleeping Stars are really good power metal inspired songs. Maybe if they kept the 'clear' songs and threw away the more 'aggressive' songs this album would have been much better. Also the keyboards do a great job creating an atmosphere, a feeling to the songs.

After all, this band is actually the side project of the finnish musician Jari Mäenpää and should be faced as one: an album destined to fans of Jari Mäenpää. Its even hard to believe that this kind of music made its way to the archives, when its really melodic death / black metal with an epic touch, and bands alike did not. Listen it only if like this genre of metal, with an epic touch.

Best tracks are: Death and the Healing, Sleeping Stars and Sadness and Hate. If you listen to these tracks you will see that there is potential here, but they are the exception and not the rule.

CCVP | 2/5 |

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