Review Summary: Technical perfection, compositionally flawed.
It's impossible to review an album like Wintersun in a pure vacuum. The level of drama surrounding Jari Maenpaa, the repeated delays of the new album, his fighting with Nuclear Blast, the kickstarter campaign, his Facebook sob stories wherein he seems not to understand that he's not the only metal musician who lives in an apartment, all of that is only balanced out by the level of frenzied adoration doled out by fans of the man and his band, more than happy to follow along behind him and send as much money as he needs to make that new album. All of that makes it rather difficult to review the album devoid of all external factors. However, I realized I'd never listened to the album fully and made a vow to do so, shedding all feelings concerning what's happened outside of the music itself.
In the end, Wintersun is an album that is very good. Not stellar, not legendary, but very good.
Your opinion on Wintersun will likely hinge upon what kind of feeling the phrase "epic power metal" stirs inside you. If your instinct is to leap up onto your coffee table and start air guitaring, you will find a whole lot to like in here. If, on the other hand, you find yourself rolling your eyes at the cheese of it all, you will probably be left more lukewarm. This is an album jam packed with palm muted drone-note riffs, furious double bass drumming, absolutely no audible bass guitar, and enough dragon-slaying atmosphere to satisfy anyone who has ever thought that owning a broadsword would be kickass.
Speaking from an execution standpoint, Wintersun is damn near flawless. There is not a single string pluck out of place, every note is razor precise, the guitar tone is crunchy and meaty when it's time to chug along or hit the heavy chords, but soaring and almost delicate when the playing goes up to the higher strings. Jari's vocals seamlessly transition from ethereal cleans to raspy snarls, layered gorgeously (seriously, the cleans somehow sound "above" the music whereas the gnarls sound "in front of" it). When atmospherics creep in, they're situated beneath the band itself rather than caked all over. I cannot imagine the drummer of this band making it through a performance without collapsing from exhaustion. Playing this album must have been like running a marathon while boxing the guy in front of you.
So what's wrong? Simply put, it's in the songwriting itself. It is, for lack of a better word, bland. Yes, there are quiet spots and loud spots, big riffs, solos, and speedy sections, but none of it does it much to make an impression. Make no mistake, this is Jari's band (the cover even has his name featured all alone), and everything done here is to highlight his guitar playing and singing. The rhythm section could have been replaced with a drum machine and nothing significant would have been lost. For the most part, every single beat is standard four counts that go on and on with the occasional tom roll for a fill. Oh sure, it's fast and whipcrack sharp, but it does nothing beyond form an unoffensive layer for the guitars and keyboards to dance atop. The bass guitar is relegated to an even more vestigial role, plunking along at the root notes and nothing else, existing simply to fill in that area of the frequency range rather than make its own contribution.
Jari's guitar playing is, to revisit an earlier point, technically very proficient but hardly memorable. Solos blitz along (Death and the Healing has a genuinely excellent one about three-fourths of the way in) and when the furious tremolo picking stretches kick in it's amazing he can play so quickly with such precision. However, once again, it's proficiency at the expense of songcraft. The music is impressive but inorganic, feeling more like the songs were mapped out on paper before notes were written. Here we'll have a fast gallop riff for a while, then some power chords there. The songs have no real heart of their own, more of an assortment of typical power metal elements. It's all done exceedingly well, but all that separates Starchild from Winter Madness, really, are the specifics. After listening to the album several times through most of the tracks still blend into an indistinct mass.
Without question, the album's highlight is Beautiful Death. Within seconds of beginning, it's obvious that this track has its own soul compared to the rest of the album. Heavier, more truly urgent, it starts off with an explosion that wouldn't sound out of place on a death/doom album before slowly picking up the pace until it gets a riff going that would be right at home on the best black metal albums, and even when the usual noodly solos and melodramatic clean howls arrive they only add to the song's majesty. Perhaps it's that the song's menace stands in such stark relief from the rest of the album, but Beautiful Death was nearly enough to bump the rating upward until I went around and the tedium of the other tracks reminded me of the remainder's runtime.
That runtime is a peculiar thing as well. Each song is slightly longer than the one before it, but there appears to be no real reason for this. The opening track isn't written any differently than the rest, it's simply much shorter, and that pulls the curtain away from the rest of the album. There's no reason for one track to be less than three minutes and another to be nearly eight when the elements are identical, and that they're arranged in the order they are has no justification beyond the implied grandeur of an album with songs that get increasingly "bigger". Unfortunately, this crushes any sense of pacing or sequence since there seems to be no reason in the music itself for this track to follow that, or this section to happen here as opposed to there, to last as long as it does rather than being cut in half or stretched out longer.
Again, Wintersun is a great album. It really is. If power metal is your thing, sit back and start jamming. The album simply rips. For this kind of music, it deserves a place in any collection and I have no doubts in my mind I'll come back to it more than once when I'm in the mood for grand, sweeping metal. Sure, it's corny, but it's fun. Those guitars are awesome and if you had this on at the gym you'd run in looking like Urkel and out looking like Ronnie Coleman. It's just shallow fun, easy to digest and just as easy to forget. Absolutely recommended, but far from essential.
