Label: Atomic Fire Records
Release date: February 11, 2022
Production: Jens Bogren
Album length: 55.45 min.
Genre: Melodic Death Metal/Progressive Metal
Rating: 9.0/10
Amorphis kicked off 2022 with the closing album of a trilogy the band started with »Under The Red Cloud« (2015) and continued with its follow-up »Queen Of Time« (2018). »Halo« is already the fourteenth studio album from this long-lived Finnish band, who have been incredibly creative especially over the last decade. Hugely consistent in every way, a worthy successor on par with both predecessors, and at moments downright brilliant, if not flat-out excellent. That’s the quick version for everyone who doesn’t feel like drowning in the following paragraphs of this review-slash-essay.
After the stylistic transition that marked their first era, the band more or less settled into the musical formula they laid out with »Eclipse« (2006) and cemented with »Skyforger« (2009), then kept refining and nurturing over the following albums until it hit its expressive peak. So the band stays true to these ingredients on their latest release too, and sounds the way only Amorphis can.
Northwards signals this right from the start, packing into one place everything that makes Amorphis instantly recognizable. A biting, gloomy, glaring guitar phrase that speaks dramatically yet bombastically at the same time, then in the mid eight passage it starts developing in a distinctly progressive way, while some of the guitar ornaments bring back that folk touch. And then there’s Tomi Joutsen’s brilliant vocal contribution, as per tradition masterfully alternating between growls and clean melodic vocals. The build-up of mood hits a crescendo in a memorable, ultra-musical melody. Melancholy, mysticism!
Most of the songs lean toward progressive-metal development, often thanks to the rhythmic solutions and structures served up by the dynamic, exploratory drumming of the seasoned Jan Rechberger, though this element is cleverly masked by the development of bombastic musicality, which shows in chorus melodies like the one caught in When The Gods Came, the title track or the phenomenal The Moon. Seven Roads Come Together opens with an already well-known motif that sounds like it slipped off »Skyforger«, but the way this composition develops in particular is a showcase of the band’s exceptional compositional maturity and experience. From there the song is built in a progressive-metal fashion, driven by death-metal gloom on one side and flecks of folk aesthetics on the other. One of the most accomplished compositions on the album, and one that could easily swap places as the opener with the no less excellent and gloomy Northward. Besides the just-mentioned Northward and Seven Roads Come Together, we run into one of the album’s most death-metal-bristling moments in the verse of The Wolf, marked by that typical atmospheric leap into an ultra-musical chorus melody. A trick that belongs to the classic Amorphis arrangement playbook. The band uses ‘mid-eight’ passages for deeply inventive and cleverly detailed modulations, which in turn push the moods within the songs onto a completely different level. Here the songs develop to the point of being downright unpredictable (e.g. the integration of a choir with a folk melody in the ‘mid-eight’ passage of The Wolf). And through it all, the band doesn’t lose, not even for a moment, that exceptionally smart thread that holds the compositional compactness together.
The rest of the album also follows the typical compositional form that Amorphis have honed down to the finest detail, and once again they impress with their masterful weaving-in of symphonic elements. The band delivers the album with tremendous vehemence, wrapped not only in melancholy and mysticism but also in ‘ominous swipes’. Fans of the band won’t be able to resist the new material for a second this time, either.
The question is what »Halo« would have looked like without all those ‘lockdown feats’ and the weird times of senseless, nonstop restrictions by the ‘tormentors’ we’ve been living under for the past two years. Without all that, Halo would probably have come out two years earlier, or Amorphis would have recorded and released two albums over the last four years instead of one. Whatever I philosophize about, one of the two guitarists, Esa Holopainen, in the time between »Halo« and its predecessor »Queen of Time«, released a phenomenal solo studio album last year, Silver Lake (Rockline review), which brilliantly and plain as day shows where one of Amorphis’ main composers draws his creative inspiration from. Ties between Esa Holopainen’s solo album and the new Amorphis album are hard to find in terms of departures from the typical Amorphis format, but »Halo« does come close to such departures, which aren’t exactly typical for Amorphis, in its closing act, the yearning, balladic and acoustic My Name Is Night, where guest vocals from singer Petronella Nettermalm (Paatos) leave their mark as she joins Joutsen in a heart-rending vocal duet. This song offers one more atmospheric detour, which on the flip side effortlessly stirs up an unquenchable thirst to spin »Halo« again.
The band puts out consistently high-quality studio releases on a relatively regular basis, all of them extremely polished and refined. That goes for their newest studio effort too, which keeps the musical coordinates of its predecessor »Queen of Time« and, on first listen, doesn’t even surprise you anymore. But the more you listen to the album, the more details you discover that leave you marveling, because they’re inventively sparkling and cunning solutions, in both the composing and the arranging. So with »Halo«, Amorphis remain great masters of their craft. You could say masters at handling their own musical recipe, which remains a unique blend of melodic death metal, progressive metal, and a theatrical dose of folk and symphonic elements. Even if the band brings nothing new, their unique musical voice always stirs up enough excitement on new releases too. »Halo« is therefore a must-have album for all you Amorphis maniacs.
Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Track list:
1. Northwards
2. On The Dark Waters
3. The Moon
4. Windmane
5. A New Land
6. When The Gods Came
7. Seven Roads Come Together
8. War
9. Halo
10. The Wolf
11. My Name Is Night
Line-up:
Tomi Joutsen – vocals
Esa Holopainen – guitar
Tomi Koivusaari – guitar, backing vocals
Santeri Kallio – keyboards
Olli-Pekka Laine – bass guitar
Jan Rechberger – drums, percussion, keyboards
Guest musicians:
Francesco Ferrini – orchestrations, keyboards
Jesse Bartholomew Zuretti – orchestrations, keyboards
Erik Mjörnell – guitar on track 11
Oskari Auramo – percussion
Petronella Nettermalm – female vocals on track 11
Noa Gruman – additional female vocals
