Eternal

At time of writing, Stratovarius' fifteenth release "Eternal" is their most recent. It's a little strange to me, because this album was released quite a while ago, and Strato was never really known as a band that took a huge amount of time between releases. They've never taken more than two to three years between releases, baring the break up drama in the mid 2000's. They're still active, though, so only time will tell if they plan on making "Eternal" their swan song and just living out their life as a live band or if we'll see more. Quite honestly, this album and the fact that there's a huge gap between this and a future album makes me think Kotipelto can't sing anymore. Kotipelto is amazingly buried in the mix of this album, and a lot of his vocals are covered up by layering and backing vocals.

Kotipelto isn't the only one, though. The production work on this entire album is dreadful. "Eternal" seemed to follow in the footsteps of "Elysium." Everything is absolutely crushed by the low register. The obnoxious rhythm guitar tone eats literally every other performance on this entire album. Kotipelto is lost, Lauri's bass work might not even exist while Matias is playing, and Rolf's drums are entirely mismatched. His snare is loud and prominent, but most of his cymbals and his bass drum are eaten as well. Jens also takes much of a backseat on the album. Instead of memorable keyboard parts, it seems he spends the entire album playing overly dramatic sounding chords to try and give "Eternal" an 'epic' feel. It fails miserably. I honestly haven't heard an album where the guitar is so gluttonous in quite a while.

And while I thought that Stratovarius couldn't get any worse than "Elysium," "Eternal" came and proved me wrong. You rarely hear albums as utterly generic and unremarkable as this one. I have listened to this album close to a dozen times, and I can honestly tell you I can't concretely tell you one thing about this album. Not one riff, not one chorus, not one section or part. Nothing. I listened to this album before starting this review, and I sat here at my keyboard drawing so much of a blank on what each song sounded like even though I literally finished it seconds before starting to write this that I literally had to play the album again WHILE I type this to remember anything. It's almost an accomplishment really. Almost every song is around the same tempo. Almost every song has the same beat and the same progression.

I had really high hopes for "Eternal," considering I thought "Nemesis" was the best post Tolkki Strato album. I had thought Strato maybe just needed a few albums to adjust to a new sound before releasing a true banger. Instead, "Eternal" is the sound of a band who has given up any pretenses to hide the shell of what they are. If you listen to "Eternal" and don't immediately think that Kotipelto is doing this to make money off of Stratovarius' successful name, I don't know what to say. I will double down on that statement if you take one minute to look up any of their last few live performance setlists. The band plays close to nothing post Tolkki. You maybe get two to three of their own songs for the whole show. Considering prime Stratovarius is the pinnacle of power metal to me, seeing all of this unabashed cash grabbing kills me.

The closing track "The Lost Saga" is probably the most 'memorable' track on "Eternal." It might be the best riff work Matias has ever had in his entire life, and it's by far the only song on the album that had any semblance of variety to it. There's honest to goodness progression in the song! It builds and flows! There's EFFORT here! If you put a gun to my head and forced me to name a second track off this album, it'd be "Man in the Mirror," but I'd have to stretch for that. The track is pretty much as generic and formulaic like the rest of the album, but it's a little bit darker than the others and has a very, very slightly catchy chorus.

As for the rest of the album? Take your pick. They're all exactly the same to me beyond those two. "Rise Above It" teases you with an opening that is ALMOST like a real Stratovarius track before laughing in your face with a plodding four more minutes of cliched nonsense. "Feeding the Fire" feels like a blatant and shameless rip off of "SOS" from "Destiny." "Shine in the Dark" is a step further than paint by numbers. The song is like if you threw 1,000 power metal 'singles' into a computer and had it spit out an original work of its own. It's that generic and cliched. I could go on and on and give one to two sentence critiques of every song on the record, but I'd trip over my own words before long.

"Eternal" is (hopefully) the bottom of the barrel for Stratovarius. If another release ever comes out, I think it'd be pretty hard to do worse than this. The best thing I can say about "Eternal" is that at no point is it unlistenable. At the same time, though, I'd contend that 'bad' is often better than 'boring.' And man was this album boring. I've given albums that I think have lower lows than this one a higher score. Why? Because at least on those, I could REMEMBER the good and the bad. All over I saw/see people say this album is the best power metal album of the year it was released? Some even claim the best Stratovarius album PERIOD? Either these people have been paid to give favorable reviews, or I received a different album than the one they did. I wouldn't recommend this album to anyone. The only people I can see enjoying this album are diehard Timo Kotipelto sympathizers. I can't say diehard Stratovarius fans, because those fans jumped off the ship a long while ago at this point.