Time II

What can you possibly say about Time II? No, that's not a rhetorical question. What can you, I, or anybody else on Earth say about the substance of this album that is of any value to yourself, myself, or anybody else on Earth? I need to lay my thesis out right at the start here. Reviews are, by nature, subjective critiques of art. They necessarily must be so because a review is predicated on having an opinion about something. I am frequently criticized for being too subjective in my writing, and that is not going to change today, but the core problem with Wintersun's long awaited new album is actually an objective one. You can not refute this, you can not say I am incorrect or misinformed, you can not claim I am interpreting the facts uncharitably to make an unfair point, there is absolutely no coherent counterargument to this 100% indisputable fact: Time II is the second half of an album that was released 12 years ago and written 18 years ago.

That's it, right? Like, what the fuck else can you or I or anybody else on Earth amend on to the end of that statement that softens the cold haymaker of reality here? Time II is an album that fundamentally can not be divorced from the surrounding non-musical circumstances of its creation and release. And the most distilled version of those circumstances is "This album was written and at least partially recorded in 2006, five songs were released in 2012, and six more were released in 2024". Everything experiential about this album will forever be colored by the looming shadow of the previous eighteen years.

Why talk about how "Way of the Fire" is an okay song that goes on a little too long when the fact is that it's been written and performed live for eons by this point? Why talk about "Silver Leaves" being one of the exceptionally few examples of Jari writing slower parts that are actually engaging on some level when the fact is that fans have endured ten straight years of him caterwauling about how no computer exists that could fully realize what is so nakedly a perfectly unremarkable symphonic melodeath song? Why talk about how much of the runtime is occupied by atmospheric intros/interludes/outros when the fact is that the band raised hundreds of thousands of euros to do so? Why talk about the mix being fine for what it is if a little bit crowded when the fact is that the album's production is the entire impetus of several rounds of fundraising and empty promises and there is apparently already a cleaner mix available if you purchase it for forty bucks from the band directly? Who cares what happens in "Storm"? The fact is that it's the penultimate song on an album that spent more time in the polishing stage than my dog's entire natural fucking lifespan and at the end of the day all that got delivered was a pretty fine if sorta unfocused album in a genre that had iterated itself beyond any boundaries that Time could've theoretically pushed two god damned decades ago. Who cares? Brymir released four different versions of this already and they weren't all that spectacular either.

It seems wrong, but it's just true, the actual substance of the album just full stop does not matter. At the end of the day, it's the second half of an album that was released 12 years ago and written 18 years ago. I'll keep saying it, because it absolutely bears repeating. There is absolutely nothing this album could've done that could've justified the slow-motion circus fire that led up to it. Time's legacy was never going to be its music, it was always going to be its story. The worst thing it could've done was conclude that story, because now we're forced to reckon with the fact that fans could've heard this in 2008 like it was initially planned and nothing would be fundamentally different about it. With that in mind, are you pleased with this result? Is Time II worth at least a few percentage points on principle because the instruments are in tune and the growls sound good? Of course not, this isn't a physics exam, it's a piece of art, and it's art that I find spectacularly artless and unworthy of merit. Do you really care that "Ominous Clouds" is a filler interlude or that Jari's clean vocals are still goofy as hell? I don't think you do. I think you care that Time II is finally released and yep it sure sounds like half of a Wintersun album. Hope that's enough for ya!

Perfect is often the enemy of good but it turns out that it can be the spectre that mediocrity spends a lifetime promising as well. I used to champion the belief that Jari was a conman who had been sitting on his ass and demanding money for years, but I no longer believe that. No, the only remaining possibility is that he must be an idiot. To spend so much of your limited time on this planet spit-shining a turd that you shit out back before X-Men 3 came out is the choice of a gibbering lunatic. I fully believe that he spent all of this time futzing around with DAWs and tweaking the levels of three hundred simultaneous fake trumpets because these songs sound like they haven't gone through a second pass since the Younger Bush administration. It doesn't sound lazy, you don't invest so much of your reputation on an album that you refuse to release until its perfect if you weren't actually trying. But it ultimately sounds dated on arrival. You can't dazzle me with nine straight minutes of blastbeats or bombastic synths anymore because the world moved on while you were busy dazzling yourself in your imagination with a hypothetical version of it. This is what happens when you're so incurious that you assume your artistic whims are unimpeachable. The intervening years weren't spent reworking or rewriting these songs, they were spent trying to make the noises in Jari's headphones match what he envisioned in his head twenty years ago. That these songs never stopped being an animating force in his artistic career is not a sign of perfectionism or creative drive, it's a sign that the creator assumed any possible improvement could only be achieved via means completely disconnected from their fundamental building blocks. That's not the action of a genius, it's the action of a child who refuses to finish their drawing until they find the exact perfect shade of blue crayon. It's like winding up a punch for 155,000 hours as though that's going to make it land 155,000 times harder when really all it accomplishes is making you look like a fuckin' clown.

Is this good enough for you? Is this worth all of the time and effort it took to realize? Does this album sound like it was worth a half million dollar paywall that took a decade to unlock? If so, I'm genuinely happy for you. I don't understand you and will not value any artistic insights you offer, but I am glad that this makes you happy. Time II could've come bundled with a gold ingot and Sofia Vergara's phone number and it would still be the second half of an album that was released 12 years ago and written 18 years ago. Nothing will ever assuage the fact that it would've been less insulting if it was never released at all.


Originally written for Lair of the Bastard