Survive

Unless I’m overlooking something obvious, I think Nemesis was my album of the year for 2013. I didn’t actually choose an album of the year at that time, but it’s probably the one from that year that I have given the highest score, and it’s certainly my most played album since I still give it a spin once every month or two. However, I’m clearly an idiot because I pretty much ignored Eternal when it came out and then didn’t even know that Stratovarius had made a new one 7 years later until after the actual release. To be honest, I wasn’t that confident that they would equal Nemesis again, and I don’t think they have, but both the last effort and this sort of new one contain some great material nonetheless. If I had to characterize Survive as anything in particular, this would be the catchy, riff-happy version of Strat, and that’s absolutely something I can enjoy.

Pretty much all notions of this group as neoclassical power metal have disintegrated by this point, even if the twiddly bits on the keyboards remain and the scales sometimes remind of the past that Timo Kotipelto and particularly Jens Johansson have enjoyed. Here, we get pop metal with proper guitars, dancey keyboards, and motivational feels, which I would characterize as “you can do it power metal”. Scan the track list and there’s barely a hiccup to be seen from the opening title track to ‘Before the Fall’, saving the number 11 slot for an 11 minute number that satisfies all epic criteria. Before that, songs actually last less than 5 minutes in almost all cases, so you can tell that the arrangements were cut back, while choruses and a kind of romping momentum help push everything forward at a decent upper-mid pace. I’ve listened to this a lot while cycling, which means mostly when I’m late for something, and Survive has been doing the job of getting me to places almost on time. Given how gloomy the cover art appears on first glance, I’d say this album packs plenty of hope.

It’s actually a bit tough for me to be more specific because the core of the songs really does gather around that upbeat style that is more a Hammerfall or Sonata Arctica trademark than anything from the earlier power metal grouping. To some extent, Nemesis had some of the same character, what with revving riffs and pretty techno moments on the keys, but it also had a lot more grit and variety to back it up, whereas this sounds like a party organized by Kotipelto for young gamers, where no alcohol is served, only energy drinks. I’m saying this because the emotive content of the songs tends to collide with their pacing, crashing into soaring choruses and out again towards bounding riffs, which is how the title track hits, and ‘Demand’, and ‘Broken’, before we start to get slightly different versions with the poppier ‘Firefly’ and some epic moments in ‘We Are Not Alone’ and ‘Frozen in Time’, especially the outro of the latter that sees the vocals reaching the greatest heights. Of the whole selection, ‘Glory Days’ seems the most like a classic Stratovarius track, channeling some of the energy from the late ‘90s period where the band was alternating between viciously fast and extremely tender material. Every song here could be a single, yet I also find it tough to pick out favourites. Survive turns out a consistent bunch, not really any failures or desert island cuts.

As a result, I think the Finns do a good job of providing minimal differences across the listen. They really seem to have mastered how to integrate balladry into this formula, starting out ‘Breakaway’ with delicate acoustic verses and a bit of a bulkier sound later on. That’s an interesting place to put the main power ballad, as the ninth song after quite a bit of action, and they opt for small sections of ‘Voice of Thunder’ to occupy similar musical territory, which naturally gives rests in the slow evolution of that long number. Besides this sometimes problematic deployment of softer styles, the rest of the task is achieved by striking a balance between straightforward hooks and epic vibes, which tends to depend on pace and what the keyboards are doing. The effect is that Survive makes very few demands on the listener and will take root in their brain extremely easily, as I found happened to me. Honestly, I don’t really believe this is the best Stratovarius album or the most skillful, but I’m sure that I’ll be listening to it a great deal more, and for that reason alone it must count as a success.