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The second Wintersun album was a long time coming, and what we get on this release is very much Jari Mäenpää's show, with his distinctive keyboard style being a key feature of the album. It's not that the keyboards dominate the album's sound exactly - although they are quite prominent in the mix - so much that the approach to playing them is so different from other symphonic metal bands that the sheer novelty of it rather distracts from everything else that's going on. With plentiful influence from Japanese music acknowledged by Jari Mäenpää creeping in, it sounds like a symphonic metal band trying to do a soundtrack for a high fantasy anime series - and if, like me, that sounds like an awesome idea to you it might be worth checking this one out for at least a cursory listen. That said, to me it seems somewhat overproduced, with bombast standing in for an absence of depth, and Jari's long struggles to get the album finished and released don't seem to have yielded results commensurate to the effort put in.