DARK PASSION PLAY

I was a bit of a fan of Nightwish before I got this album. I had enjoyed listening to a lot of their stuff on the internet, and I could tell that quite a bit of it had some demanding musicianship to it. I figured I should get one of their albums, so I went for their latest one. I had known from looking up some stuff about the band that they had changed vocalists, but I was sure that the band wouldn't make too drastic of a change from their operatic singer Tarja. So I got this the next time I got to a shopping mall.

I put this in the CD player of the car and got ready to listen. I had known that the first track was a long one, so I figured it must be an epic like Ghost Love Score which went through several themes and moods and was absolutely fantastic. But once the drums came in on The Poet and the Pendulum, it felt like an average goth/alternative/rock song with a medium tempo 4/4 beat. Nothing special. The song continued, and I was apalled. This is a 13 minute song, and it's relying on pop hooks! Nothing grandiose or epic happens in the whole 13 minutes of this one. Granted, it's not the same chord progression over and over, so it happens to be a good long track, just not a great one.

The next couple of songs come on. More pop hooks, more distorted guitar that is prominent enough in the mix even to be called close to metal. Basic verse and chorus structures. The new vocalist sounds like some pop solo artist in front of a run of the mill alternative band. Nothing sticks out at all. Master Passion Greed sounds promising at the beginning enough to be at least a good metal song, but then it goes back to sounding like a regular old goth song. Eva breaks up the mediocre mid-tempo tracks to give the listener a mediocre slow-temp track instead. Yes, it is a pretty little song, but compared to Nightwish tracks in the past, it pales. It then goes back to the mid-tempo tracks.

There's a couple of songs saving the album from going entirely unlistenable. The Islander is a lovely track with maybe a drop of Celtic ballad influence. Marco, the bassist finally gets to kick the new dissapointment of a singer Annette into the background while he sings beautifully, this is the long forgotten light at the end of the world. They continue in the vein of this song by following it up with the instrumental Last of the Wilds another fairly good track. Again, you don't hear Anette's voice, possibly one of the reasons that this is one of the few listenable tracks on the album.

The next track, 7 Days to the Wolves goes back to the pop-like styles of the previous songs. The only difference is that the bridge section has a different tempo than the rest of the song, but the instrumental break really doesn't go anywhere.

Meadows of Heaven is a bit of a step up from a few of the songs. It's another ballad, starting off with a quiet pop/orchestral type background and ending the album on a pseudo gospel type ending. I guess this was probably one of the best ways to end the album. Nothing all that great, but better than most of the tracks on the album.

Overall, this is just a regressive step for Nightwish. This album is basically a pop album with pseudo heavy guitar and pseudo symphonic orchestra behind it. Nothing special.