I've been wanting to write a review for this album almost since it came out nearly ten years ago. At the time, I was only four years into having discovered Nightwish, the first metal band I fell in love with. I became a fan at kind of a weird time: a little prior to Anette being announced as the new singer. At the time, I was on board with 'Dark Passion Play' despite its bloatedness, and saw it as a basically logical progression of their evolving sound. I attended both legs of their American tour for that record. I must have never looked forward to an album as much I looked forward to Imaginaerum. I really thought this band could do no wrong.
The disappointment of Imaginaerum made it easier for me to accept during the Floor era that Nightwish is no longer primarily a metal band. I was stunned when I first listened to this album: I just couldn't believe I was going track after track after track without a single song blowing me away in the way 'Ever Dream', 'Dark Chest of Wonders', and 'Amaranth' had. 'Storytime' was a serviceable lead single but the whimsical lyrical themes and sweet-tasting chorus that dialed down the interior drama and redirected that energy toward childlike fantasy were playing into all of Tuomas's worst, most self-indulgent tendencies. 'I Want My Tears Back', another single, also goes in that direction; between the two songs there are copious references to Peter Pan, Alice In Wonderland, and Disney, including a name-drop of Mary Costa, the woman who played the voice of Sleeping Beauty in the 1950s Disney film. The Celtic instrumentals are also dialed up even farther than they were in 'Dark Passion Play'. The melodies are all fine, but they lack the kind of intensity we'd been accustomed to just a couple of albums ago.
Something to notice here is that, although there are 13 tracks, three of them are instrumental and another three are ballads. That's seven uptempo tracks on a metal album. If you're gonna go this light on the metal, every song had better count. Granted, there's at least one really stellar ballad here: 'Slow, Love, Slow', which is not a metal song, or a pop song, and is only a kind-of-sort-of a jazz song, but whatever it is, it sure is interesting to the ear; I simply have not heard very many songs that sound like this, from Nightwish or anyone else. Moreover, it's a song written to the strengths of Anette Olzon's voice, and proves that Olzon is a competent, emotionally rich singer. (Tuomas is really so abusive to his singers!) 'The Crow, the Owl, and the Dove' is a pretty folk ballad, although the lyrics are a bit confused, asking simultaneously for innocence and truth. (Pick a lane!) At any rate, if 'Dark Passion Play' was full of songs written for Tarja and handed off to Anette, 'Imaginaerum' is fully written for Anette's voice -- and her voice is much better than her detractors ever gave her credit for.
As has been noted ad nauseum by now, part of this album is dripping with mall-goth pretension and feels like it's wearing a Jack Skellington shirt; the bloated 'Scaretale', which doesn't know what it wants to be, meanders and makes twist after twist without ever feeling like it goes anywhere, is like this. Annoying children's choirs -- it's a metal commandment of mine that Thou Shalt Not Use Children's Choirs -- are present in two -- two! -- songs, including what is otherwise an album highlight, 'Rest Calm', which gets totally derailed by annoying singing children halfway through. Who put these singing kids in the middle of my metal? -- But then again, by this point, was Nightwish even still a metal band? The guitars on this album are so neutered, and Nightwish was never a particularly aggressive band in the first place -- from 'Oceanborn' through 'Century Child', the guitars came out to play very frequently, and on 'Once' there was a compromise between a modern metal and a traditional power metal sound, halfway between the chugging sound of 'Dark Passion Play' and the more aggressive sound of the early years. Even on 'Dark Passion Play', Emppu was given 'Whoever Brings the Night' to show off. But on 'Imaginaerum' the orchestrations are the star.
You do get some actual attempts made at throwing together some memorable metal songs: Ghost River, Last Ride of the Day, and the first half of Song of Myself. Ghost River is just not catchy enough for being the second major song on the tracklist despite containing some of the best guitar work on the album. Last Ride of the Day checks its box and is probably note-for-note the hookiest track here but does not come close to the heights of past albums. 'Song of Myself' actually rolls along quite competently for the first six minutes or so, feeling like it is at least on track to match 'Poet and the Pendulum' in quality (i.e., good but not great) until the rug is pulled out from under us and we are, um, treated to an absurdly long spoken-word piece with some of the most overwrought, melodramatic, corny 'self-reflective' material I have ever heard. Please, for the love of God, metal musicians: study this song closely to learn what never to do. The only other song that makes me feel this way is Lost Horizon's 'Highlander (The One)', in which the singer goes on for minutes at a time doing nothing but spoken-word chanting. Spoken-word sections in metal music should be used extremely sparingly. There are a hundred ways to mess up spoken-word sections and only a few ways to use them well. This song would commence Tuomas's bullshit trick of padding his 'long' songs with minutes upon minutes of superfluous filler solely for the sake of extending the length of the song. He totally did this with Ghost Love Score, too; the final choirs go on endlessly but finally stop when the song clocks in at 10 minutes. Surely I am not the only one who noticed this.
I suppose as a whole I'd have to say this album is very confused. There is less material here than there appears at first glance, and there's no obvious highlight. Nearly every song has a major, glaring flaw -- even the ones that are generally competent. Coming down from the high of 'Once', this is a pretty significant decline. And the decline comes from Tuomas giving himself a blank check to indulge all his worst tendencies: any sense of restraint he'd ever felt, either from Tarja, the record label, or just not having access to a real orchestra, is gone. And the music has become more bloated and confused and self-indulgent for it. At least in the last part of the spoken-word section on 'Song of Myself', finishing up the album, he refers to himself as a manboy. Because if this album revealed anything about him, it's that he sure is that.

Brookdale pay stubs. According to their policy, all three should have been informed and an insistent report should have been filed. I inspected her body and noticed an abrasion to her leg. The second fall went unreported to myself, facility management, and hospice. The following day, I visited my mother and noticed she was in pain and obviously distressed.

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Nightwish Full Discography Torrent Download. Download the Nightwish Discography Torrent or choose other Nightwish Discography torrent downloads. Nightwish: End of an Era - 2006 End of an Era is a DVD and double CD from the Finnish symphonic power metal quintet Nightwish. Nightwish - Imaginaerum (2011). Style: Symphonic/Power Metal. Origin: Finland. Location: Kitee. Label: Nuclear Blast. Theme: Fantasy.

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Tracklist
1. Taikatalvi 02:35
2. Storytime 05:22
3. Ghost River 05:28
4. Slow, Love, Slow 05:50
5. I Want My Tears Back 05:07
6. Scaretale 07:32
7. Arabesque 02:57
8. Turn Loose the Mermaids 04:20
9. Rest Calm 07:02
10. The Crow, the Owl and the Dove 04:10
11. Last Ride of the Day 04:32
12. Song of Myself 13:37
13. Imaginaerum 06:18

• Info
  • Date - 14 Jul, 15
  • Author - Nightwish
  • Views - 482
  • Reviews - 0