Music is not food. People approach writing music these days like they are going to cook up a fucking meal.. "I'll put on my little pink apron that says "Sunbather" on it with some nice little floral designs, and I'll take this genre, and put it in a blender with that genre, and throw in a pinch of seasoning from this other fucking stupid genre, and throw in trills and imbelishments of this and that, and this shit will be the hottest thing in underground music right now and explode like wildfire!"

Undoubtedly my biggest issue here is the dreaded synthphonics which fill every second of this cancerous lump. Symphonies and metal already have a strained relationship with anything even remotely resembling quality music. The reasons for this are pretty obvious, first and foremost being that most bands put literally no effort into combining the two sounds with any sort of care, meaning you end up with a bunch of strings and horns over the top of completely vapid, uninteresting chug riffs or gallops. The second reason is that many bands who do this seem to have a really low tier interest in classical music despite, you know, making their music focus entirely on it, meaning you're more likely to be getting boring film soundtrack tones rather than something intricate and carefully composed. All in all, the formula tends to be pretty bad as is, boring riffs and boring movie scores played in tandem. It's not exactly thrilling stuff, despite the odd one pulling something more compelling out of their ass.

Co-existing with the bands which use real orchestras or realistic synths to attempt to recreate an authentic sound are the ones who play up their synthiness at the same time as removing the focus from the riffs, and there is no forgiveness for them. These sort of bands have all the same issues of mixing boring metal and boring quasi-classical "stirring strings", but they lack the texture or "authenticity" of it all. Instead of paying out the arse for a real symphony, or trying tweak their keyboard effects to make it sound like it features real instruments, synthphonic bands wear their fabricated nature as a badge of honour. They proudly choose the most digitized and barely approximate midi tones and slap them right up front, not aiming for the scale of a real symphony, but instead to obtain a smaller scale form of splendor. Many of these bands deliberately opt for an overall low gloss sound, using their cheapness as a form of minimalistic authenticity of its own outside of any sort of organic validity to the impersonated instruments, like Summoning for instance. The general idea does have a following due it reminding people of mid 90's RPG music, although since that style of music that ever appalled to me, so I utterly despise it with all my being, and any band who does it is bound to be a laughable joke of pseudo-epic garbage to my ears. So, where does Wintersun's fit in to all this? Simply, Time I is by far the most synthphonic album ever made.

Knowing how synth focused the style already is, finding a way to be clearly more overdone than any of their peers is a tough ask, but Time I pulls it off with ease. Wintersun's second full length album is ridiculously committed to the cause of using blatant computerised replications of real instruments to create epic soundscapes over literally every second of the album. Fast or slow, bold or pensive, it doesn't matter, this album is drowning in superfluous computer sound. The big difference they've got in comparison to other poorly synthesized symphonic acts is how they've gone about it in a shiny, slick way instead of trying to capture some kind of goofy dungeon synth or video game retro vibe. It's disgusting. As in the very concept makes me feel sick in the guts. This is loaded to the tits with layer after layer of bad sounding digitized violins, horns, choirs, Japanese instruments, random beeps and laser sounds, and whatever else the band found in the hundred and eighty three midi packs they downloaded. Every element of the music sounds like it was played by pressing a key, even when it's a supposed to sound like a number of string instruments soaring off one another; every "instrument" here plays in tones, rather than notes or plucks or chords. This isn't aiming for some kind of retro epic, this is aiming for genuine, expressive and bold grandeur and it fails horribly based on how utterly plastic, glossy and downright fake it all sounds, as well as how badly it's all written.

Just having a terrible sound is bad enough, but the composition here is embarrassingly poor too. The melodies created by the synths are simplistic and unmoving, made even worse by their pristine smoothness since they're a tone mapped to a button, not someone actually drawing a bow along a string, which keeps any character from reverberating through a single note. The band covers for the lack of individual quality by playing about eight of them at any given time and it's just way too much. The whole album is messy clusterfuck of vaguely similar melodies being played on a wide range of phoney instruments at the same time, with nothing in particular taking centre stage or developing into anything impressive. Everything stays at the same lacking standard of being a tedious melodic power or folk metal transposition, and any sort of attempted escalation or growth within the music is handled by just throwing a different tedious melodic power or folk metal transposition over the top. Individually every part sounds like shit, but as a whole the cacophony is downright annoying and it never fucking stops. I'd complain that the complete, unwavering focus on the garish and grating keyboard crap was drowning out the metal, but the metal here is somewhere between ridiculously gay 16th note abusing Euro power, rejected Ensiferum jigs, and vapid melodeath that makes the debut look halfway decent by comparison, so the fact they've buried the garbage is one of the few positive things I could say about the album..

To give an album a score of 0% is to imply it is an artistic nadir with absolutely no musical merit, no fulfillment of potential. Most people, including myself, believe that such a strong position demands solid, fleshed-out reasoning that covers all bases in the writer's argument.

I dunno why people complain so much about reviews being long or "bloated", anyways. I'd much rather read a lengthy exposition that greatly changes how I think of the album as opposed to a quick blurb.

When you're reviewing a book, you don't go on about what words the author used.

To give an album a score of 0% is to imply it is an artistic nadir with absolutely no musical merit, no fulfillment of potential. Most people, including myself, believe that such a strong position demands solid, fleshed-out reasoning that covers all bases in the writer's argument.

Wilytank is an accomplished reviewer

I'll throw a deer at the next dude who'll review Agalloch's The Mantle. Just...stop! Everything has been said about this ATMOSPHERIC, BEATIFUL and EVOCATIVE album.

I'll throw a deer at the next dude who'll review Agalloch's The Mantle. Just...stop! Everything has been said about this ATMOSPHERIC, BEATIFUL and EVOCATIVE album.

Another horrible review.
http://www.metal-archives.com/reviews/F ... 1/mjollnir

Only 4 sentences are about the music.

Yeah, sorry man, but this review was pretty dated. RIP.

Ugh, that fucking Innsmouth review. COULDN'T BE MORE WRONG.