Dance Like Nobody's Watching
I like people who know who they are, and who are unrepentantly themselves. This washes over into my music, too.
For the last decade or so, two of my favorite bands have been Sonata Arctica and Nightwish. Both metal bands from Europe, specifically Finland. And I perceive a pretty big culture difference between European metal bands and American ones, because the latter are all infused with a need to seem cool. The former are more often infused with a desire to BE AWESOME, and clearly give no fucks if you like them or not. And it was a disappointment to me when both bands have come out with two lame, weak albums in a row: Dark Passion Play (2007, Nightwish), Imaginaerum (2011, Nightwish), Stones Grow Her Name (2012, Sonata Arctica), and Pariah's Child (2014, Sonata Arctica). The Nightwish albums were okay, and they were majorly focused on their lead singer, who they lost in 2005, so a stumble was natural. I have no idea what Sonata Arctica's problem is, but they still seem like they're having fun, even if I'm not having that much fun along with them these days.
Nightwish lost their new lead singer mid-tour, and got an emergency replacement who was incredibly good, and who they later decided to bring on permanently. They released their new album on Tuesday. I was really doing my best not to be invested in it, after four disappointments in a row from my two favorite bands, each worse than the last. But the new singer is really really good, and they brought on a guy who does uillean pipes, also a former guest star on previous albums. And the thought of hearing Nightwish at full blast again was pretty awesome. What they delivered has pretty well blown me out of the water.
Nightwish has always produced music that's entirely free of shame, but this album has done a whole other thing. It's made out of the polar opposite of shame, of a thing that annihilates shame in a burst of energy like matter does antimatter. The songs are centered around evolution, the extreme unlikeliness of life ever having existed, and the extent to which that makes whatever life does exist inherently amazing by contrast. The title of the album (and one of the songs on it) is taken from a quote from Darwin's On the Origin of the Species:
There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.
...and really, that spirit infuses the whole album, and is close to the core of what I love about both bands: some of the things they sing about are wonderful, and some of them are terrible, but the spirit with which they engage those topics is universally, wholeheartedly, full-throatedly life-affirming.
The whole thing is fantastic, and there's not a bad song on the album, though for sure I like some more than others. Special mention, though, has to be given to the last track, which is an orgiastic edifice of amazingness. It clocks in at 24 minutes and 1 second. Surely at some point in the process someone must have said "Do you really want to go there?" The response, clearly, was, "We will not merely 'go there', we will drastically change the labor allocation of entire nations with which to build a 'there', and a shining public transit system to 'there' which, alone, could rival any of the Ancient Wonders, and we will see to it that free tickets on this system are delivered to every person now living on this glorious earth." And lo, for the interloper then said, "I don't know, doesn't that seem silly?" and humanity is richer for that person having been ignored. It is the entire band, now a sextet, ejaculating pure prog-rock-symphonic-metal all over your face for almost a half an hour, and I for one am pleased to greet our new rock-bukakke overlords. Indeed, LSD and other substances may well have come into existence primarily so they could one day be consumed prior to listening to this song.
Some day, I will be dead, and so will you. But for now, we are alive, and where there is life, there is at least the potential for joy, and that is a great and wonderful thing.
We were here.
For the last decade or so, two of my favorite bands have been Sonata Arctica and Nightwish. Both metal bands from Europe, specifically Finland. And I perceive a pretty big culture difference between European metal bands and American ones, because the latter are all infused with a need to seem cool. The former are more often infused with a desire to BE AWESOME, and clearly give no fucks if you like them or not. And it was a disappointment to me when both bands have come out with two lame, weak albums in a row: Dark Passion Play (2007, Nightwish), Imaginaerum (2011, Nightwish), Stones Grow Her Name (2012, Sonata Arctica), and Pariah's Child (2014, Sonata Arctica). The Nightwish albums were okay, and they were majorly focused on their lead singer, who they lost in 2005, so a stumble was natural. I have no idea what Sonata Arctica's problem is, but they still seem like they're having fun, even if I'm not having that much fun along with them these days.
Nightwish lost their new lead singer mid-tour, and got an emergency replacement who was incredibly good, and who they later decided to bring on permanently. They released their new album on Tuesday. I was really doing my best not to be invested in it, after four disappointments in a row from my two favorite bands, each worse than the last. But the new singer is really really good, and they brought on a guy who does uillean pipes, also a former guest star on previous albums. And the thought of hearing Nightwish at full blast again was pretty awesome. What they delivered has pretty well blown me out of the water.
Nightwish has always produced music that's entirely free of shame, but this album has done a whole other thing. It's made out of the polar opposite of shame, of a thing that annihilates shame in a burst of energy like matter does antimatter. The songs are centered around evolution, the extreme unlikeliness of life ever having existed, and the extent to which that makes whatever life does exist inherently amazing by contrast. The title of the album (and one of the songs on it) is taken from a quote from Darwin's On the Origin of the Species:
There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.
...and really, that spirit infuses the whole album, and is close to the core of what I love about both bands: some of the things they sing about are wonderful, and some of them are terrible, but the spirit with which they engage those topics is universally, wholeheartedly, full-throatedly life-affirming.
The whole thing is fantastic, and there's not a bad song on the album, though for sure I like some more than others. Special mention, though, has to be given to the last track, which is an orgiastic edifice of amazingness. It clocks in at 24 minutes and 1 second. Surely at some point in the process someone must have said "Do you really want to go there?" The response, clearly, was, "We will not merely 'go there', we will drastically change the labor allocation of entire nations with which to build a 'there', and a shining public transit system to 'there' which, alone, could rival any of the Ancient Wonders, and we will see to it that free tickets on this system are delivered to every person now living on this glorious earth." And lo, for the interloper then said, "I don't know, doesn't that seem silly?" and humanity is richer for that person having been ignored. It is the entire band, now a sextet, ejaculating pure prog-rock-symphonic-metal all over your face for almost a half an hour, and I for one am pleased to greet our new rock-bukakke overlords. Indeed, LSD and other substances may well have come into existence primarily so they could one day be consumed prior to listening to this song.
Some day, I will be dead, and so will you. But for now, we are alive, and where there is life, there is at least the potential for joy, and that is a great and wonderful thing.
We were here.