Review Summary: My short attension span now draws to the controversial new album 'The Days of Grays' by Sonata. This album has been highly rated as well as slayed by reviewers so as I rub my hands together in a totally uncalled for way I will now attempt to readdress the
After Sonata Arctica released their follow up album to 'Reckoning Night' named simply 'Unia' (No! For The Sake of Revenge doesn't count as it is a live one you silly sausage!) Sonata's musical direction was somewhat in question as Unia was a little bit too *La Dee Dah* for a power metal band, hinting that the band was changing it's style from those catchy 5 minute epics to something a bit more progressive and experiemental...
For many months we anxoiusly gritted our teeth until our mouths were a gummy waste land until.... (Drum Roll Please) .....
FLAG IN THE GROUND!!!
Phew! Thank God, Sonata were back to their old tricks with a catchy 4 minute power fest (Sure the verses were a little random but we persiviered) so when the day finally arrived and Days of Grays was finally released we put on our favourite SA T-shirt, worshiped at the holy Sonata Shrine for a few hours in thanks and then high tailed it to the Sonata mobile and shot down to any place capable of supplying such gold!!!
HOWWWWEVER!!!
As soon as the shiny round disk began to spin and we opened our loving arms of power metal brotherhood, we were greeted by an American girl (who is apparently Finnish??? Go figure) singing about her kin and as this musical introduction built into the gripping climax at the beggining of Deathaura the entire album cried "MAYDAY" and plummited into a bleak expanse of melodic distortion and odd progressive transitions to which I was truely devistated...
The rest of the album with the exception of 'Flag in the Ground' was exactly the same, no catchy melodies in sight and the melodies that did exist were overlayed with the typical Tony Kakko trick of over dubbing himself 40 thousand times, drawing more attention to the fact it wasn't catchy or even melodic!
I was sure there had to be some old skool sonata stuff somewhere and I found myself scouring the album like a blind man looking for his bacon sandwich resulting in finding only 'No Dream Can Heal A Broken Heart' and the later part of 'Juliet' and that was it!
Now. Imagine a world where Sonata did not exist (Unpleasent I know but bear with me on this one) now if you came across 'The Days of Grays' without any prior knowledge of Sonata and judged it purely on its merit you would discover that this is a VERY good album!
Musically it is a true credit to Sonata Arctica. Technically and Dynamically fantastic however it lacks one major bioilluminesent factor which is simply; Passion! If you listen to Ecliptica, Silence, Winterhearts Guild, Reckoning Night or any other Sonata album you will soon realise that these albums were not constructed like some kind of artistic quadratic equation but purely and simply a group of guys from Kemi making music that makes the hairs on your tongue stand on end from the poetic emotional rollercoaster of songs like Tallulah and Shamandalie to the other extreme of songs like Reventulet and Wildfire which resemble the act of gluing a toaster to the back of a beaver, just for ***s and giggles
So my closing statement your honour is that Sonata can either bring back the catchyness in a big way and reaffirm themselves as the Top Dogs of Melodic Power Metal, If they want their random progressive tangents thats fine, but everything in moderation.
or
They can keep releasing albums that say "Look at me! Look how clever I am!" ignore the things that people loved about Sonata songs in the first place and join the world of prog metal. But then in fairness you might as well just listen to Dream Theatre
