The Black Waltz

This album is quite a surprise. After being a fairly big fan of Kalmah for a while now I Found myself hyping this album up big time. Now that it’s finally out, I feel that even though the sweet out weighs the bitter (big time), I do have one slight complaint. The vocals have gone in a direction that I am not too happy with but at the same time I don’t hate at all. Now don’t get me wrong, Pekka’s new vocals sound great but the problem is that they are consistently deeper and harder to decipher now. This change makes the general sound of the entire album feel slightly more monotone then previous albums. I would have liked to see some of the higher pitched, throaty growls we heard in the previous albums mixed in a bit more. My guess is they got sick of people comparing them to Children of Bodom. If this is the case, they succeeded because TBW doesn’t sound much like COB at all. Now that I got the bitter out of the way lets get to the sweet. This album must have been recorded and mastered by Jesus Christ himself because it sounds nothing short of miraculous. One thing that definitely hasn’t changed is kalmah's fast paced, intense guitar and keyboard barrage that I’ve grown to love. The entire album has a very epic sound to it. It’s also very clear that a lot of work was put into this album. All the songs are very well composed and have a lot of depth to them. Many of the songs have different parts or “chapters” to them that include interesting and unpredictable intros, solos and outros. If you’re a fan of the three previous albums you will not be disappointed with this one. If I was forced to have a complaint about this album it would be the slight over use of the deeper vocals but this hardly hurts it as a whole. Bottom line is, get it!