It's been a long time since Amorphis and I have parted ways.
It's not that I don't like their music, in fact, I just don't really care about their
music anymore, because after releasing such an album as Tales From The Thousand
Lakes, you can't simply turn your back on death metal and release stuff
such as Elegy, Tuonela and Am Universum claiming
it's still heavy metal.
Just like Paradise Lost after Gothic, Amorphis
changed their musical orientation after their strongest album Tales
From The Thousand Lakes, but contrary to Paradise Lost,
Amorphis never released an Icon or a Draconian
Times after their musical turn. To me, and after quite some listens, Far
From The Sun is an album just like its predecessors, far, far away from
what the band did best a decade ago. It's another album that is easy listening
to but unfortunately rather uninspired and insipid. I bet the purpose of such
an album is to climb the Finnish charts, generate money and make their new major label,
Virgin, happy selling tons and tons of records.
What does remain after all ? A couple of good tunes such as opening track Days
Of Your Beliefs and Killing Goodness where the band remembers that metal is to be played with a guitar. Except for that, there's a bunch of mellow
non metal tracks such as... well I won't name all of them anyway. Gosh it hurts
to listen to such uninspired metal when you know the potential of this band.
I mean Elegy was quite a good metal album because there was some great
metal stuff left, but after that came nothingness.
This new album surely will please those who call themselves open-minded
listeners and they will probably shoot me down in flames, but I don't care since
this isn't metal anymore. Paradise Lost also had their pop
metal years, but fortunately they came back with a strong metal album of today.
Hopefully so will these Finnish guys.