World on Fire

I don’t know why I even get surprised that Stratovarius still makes top quality music. Maybe because the general trend is that bands start to veer off of their long term path by exploring (sometimes) suspicious directions (khm... Sonata Arctica). This is not the case with Strato.

I think the primary savior of this band was Matias Kupiainen himself back in 2008, and most likely the overall chemistry among the members works well still. This is evidently felt in the music, it’s bombastic, energetic, gives no signs of pudding approach, if it had a physical form then it would come in a major sized, metal reinforced boots that would annihiliate the listener’s balls.

There are two singles preceeding the album, and although Survive (the other single) is a decent song my favorite from the two would be World on Fire. The song starts off with a massive headbanger of a riff with Rolf Pilve laying a double bass base variating with occassionally added 16th beats. Even the verse riff is technical enough to be entertaining in itself, in my view, Timo Tolkki has never written so elaborate and delicate riffs like Matias. This technical yet powerful riffing approach gives a bulldoser-type picture to the whole music, it pops out of the speakers and rips your head off.

The build up with the bridge is already massive, especially with Jens Johansson's haunting choir pads in the background, so when the gigantic chorus hits in, then the listener may offer his/her melted face on a plate, Blast this through your car speakers and people will run amok to give you way. I can see this will be an arena favorite on the concerts. Strato have really put efforts to increase the sing-along factor in their recent outputs. Timo’s voice is powerful as always, no signs of fatigue there and he delivers wonderful melodies as well, Tony Kakko could take notes once again.

And then if the majestic vocal performance is not enough, then comes Matias again and obliterates the ears with a solo that's albeit short but melodic and again top notch technical; to me resembling to some extent to Per Nilsson's works. The lyrics seems to be basically about the human effect on the nature, the exploit and destruction we do every day. This is not really a new topic for Stratovarius, already Visions had these nature-protecting lyrics, pointing out the beautiful human feature that leads us to destroy the planet.

It has been 7 long years since the latest full length release but with this single Stratovarius showed they don’t tend to slow down and they stand strong on the power metal pedestal. Looking forward for the full album!