DARK PASSION PLAY

Okay, I finally feel that i have a good feel for this album after a bit over a week of listening at least once a day. First of all, I love Nightwish and I was worried that with Tarja's powerful vocals gone, the band wouldn't be very good anymore. However, the new vocalist, Anette Olzon, does not disappoint. She is much more of a standard rock singer than Tarja, but her voice fits the new direction Nightwish had been taking starting with Century Child. Outside of the vocals, this is quite possibly Nightwish's strongest effort musically. As much as I do miss the amount of guitar solos in the songs on recent albums, I find the orchestra to be very strong and also much more up front than it was on once, and this kind of makes up for the lack of guitar leads. First off, the album starts with "The Poet and the Pendulum", a 5 piece epic in which the band and orchestra are complemented by a choir and a male soprano. The song starts off in a very haunting fashion and builds up into a symphonic metal masterpiece with very emotional and depressing lyrics. This is a very cathartic song and I believe that it is the best the band has written as of yet. My other favourite song on this album is the instrumental "Last of the Wilds", which is their first since "Moondance" from Oceanborn. I believe that they outdid themselves this time, and wrote a very uplifting celtic metal tune, complemented by bagpipes, tin whistle, and fiddle. Several of the the songs on the album have this celtic feel, and i hope it is something they incorporate more into their music as time goes on. I will only give this four stars because i think some of the songs are not very strong. Firstly, "Sahara" is the obligatory eastern sounding track. Also, I do not like "Amaranth" all too much. Neither are bad songs, I just don't feel they are up to par with what they are capable of. It can also be noted that bassist/vocalist Marco Hietala plays a bigger role on this album and is given more space than before, and he even sings lead on two of the songs, those being the pseudo symphonic thrash number "Master Passion Greed", and the acoustic "The Islander", another of the songs with a celtic feel. Overall, a very good album and i am excited for what this band will do in the future.