Tales from the Thousand Lakes is a dense, serious volume of music. It is rich, consistent, lucid, and dark. And the darkness is not an "evil" kind of darkness, it is almost a physical darkness. Sometimes I visualize images when I listen to this album, and the images are usually of a totally black sky against cold, bright snow. The music also feels very brown, warm, and organic at the same time.

For most of the album, the rhythm guitars, drums, and bass roll on slow or midtempo riffs, that are robust and doomy. Sometimes the tone ebbs about, and sometimes it is crunchy and well-defined. The rhythms and pulse are very consistent across each song, but the emphasis is most often on texture and chord progressions.

Mixed into this foundation swim the lead guitar and piano/keyboard/moog. They play no solos, but rather somber, substantive melodic patterns that are well-connected to the rhythm riffs. They usually soak the whole song, rather than just certain sections. In Amorphis, the piano/keyboard player (Kasper Martenson) is an active songwriter, so the piano and keyboard parts are integral and effective, rather than an afterthought as they are in most bands.

There are not many albums where I think, "That's an awesome piano riff" or "that synthesizer line was fucking brilliant." It's not because they're more technically complicated than other keyboard stuff I've heard. It is because they use these songs powerfully and make the songs more powerful at the same time.

Most of the singing is in the form of very hearty death metal vocals, but sometimes there are clean vocals. The clean vocalist has a great range, but a very smooth timbre. This is not "over the top" Halford/Dickinson-type wailing. He sounds like the singing keyboard lines in the same way that the death vocals sound like the rhythm guitar parts.

The whole band is clearly proficient at their various roles, but it comes out in the consistency and natural feel of their playing, rather than technical flashes. The same feel is present in the song structures. There are usually only about four or five riffs per song, although they are presented across several layers in different variations. No section is rushed. You get plenty of time to contemplate everything. Sometimes they go for sharp contrast between sections, but usually it's a subtle change in feel.

The lyrics are taken mostly from the "Finnish national pole book Kalevala." They are all ancient Finnish tales and work well inside the epic and somber music. None of the songs have choruses or regular verses; the vocals just go where they fall.

This album (and Amorphis in general) has a very distinct identity, but if you had to break it down, I think it resembles Black Sabbath, Entombed, Metallica, At the Gates, and the Doors at various times. And probably some Finnish folk music as well, but I've never heard Finnish folk music.

Currently, I think the best pieces are Black Winter Day, Thousand Lakes (a piece for just piano and bells), Into Hiding, In the Beginning, and Magic and Mayhem, in which the band breaks into a very surprising but fitting techno-sounding section. But Tales from the Thousand Lakes works best as an album, rather than a collection of songs. It was great in the summer, but I look forward to listening to it on a somber and bleak black winter day.

© 1999 abasmagorsulpherion