Review Summary: An album ravaged by time.
I hate this.
I hate how it sounds. I hate the circumstances of its release. I hate what it represents. There is very little music, no matter how bad, that has been able to irritate me on this level. Plenty of music is worse than this, with worse songwriting and worse instrumentation. There’s no shortage of music with worse production either, or worse intentions behind it. Hell, there’s albums with worse histories too. Albums with even more time, effort, money and good will completely wasted. Gone forever.
No, this album deserves a specific kind of hatred.
Let me preface this by saying that I am a fan of this kind of music. Death Cult Armageddon is a classic to me, no matter how untrve its reputation. Devin Townsend is one of my favorite musicians of all time, no matter how hard he progs out. I am completely on board with excess, I even gave Wilderun’s latest exercise in Hans Zimmer-certified symphonic bombast a 5. I must emphasize this as hard as I can, I am not an elitist who looks down on music like this. It is precisely because I am the target audience for this album that I hate it so much.
Album covers don’t always accurately represent the music, but they absolutely do in Wintersun’s case. 2004’s self-titled featured some prime Necrolord, lovingly painted and continuing the lineage of bands like Dissection and Sacramentum. Time I’s art was an immediate downgrade, some amateurish but colorful Photoshop work which I suppose established some sort of “vibe”. The Forest Seasons then blessed us with some Thomas Kinkade-looking crap that’s difficult to remark upon, a highly saturated and unnatural depiction of nature best suited for a jigsaw puzzle or Jehovah’s Witness recruitment leaflet.
Now we’re blessed with Time II, its cover and accompanying material being half-assed AI-generated nothingness. The composition is basic but drowned in a hideous abundance of visual noise, its intention to wow the viewer with detail and grandiosity which only disintegrates under scrutiny. There’s some vaguely Japanese looking iconography that lacks the commitment of even the most half-hearted weeaboo, complete with the album title being printed in a chop suey-ass typeface. I could end the review there, you now know how the music sounds.
It might sound unfair that I’m being so dismissive of the music itself. Surely I must hand it to Jari that his guitar shredding is sick as hell (it is), that he has a great ear for melody (he does) and that his band has immense talent (they’ve been recruited for Megadeth and Nightwish for a reason). Couldn’t I look past the awful mixing and mastering and assess the album on its merits? No. I refuse to and I’ll tell you why.
Time II doesn’t sound this way due to lack of means. If it was done on the cheap in someone’s bedroom not only would I be more forgiving but I also would have heard it 15 years ago. A huge amount of time and money was spent making it sound precisely like this, for all intents and purposes this is how you were meant to hear it. Jari is not some hack, he is an expert guitarist who has honed his skills over decades. Not everyone has the trained ear of Jens Bogren or Fredrik Nordstrom… which is why you hire them to mix your album. It riles me up to no end that his best sounding album (the first one) is the one he deems most inadequate.
Speaking of time, changes in the musical landscape in the intervening years have ensured Time II would be dead on arrival. Time I was somewhat forgivable in 2012 with the breakout success of self-produced bands like Periphery, but now that more natural sounding recordings are in vogue there was simply no chance for Time II. The definitive version of The Way of the Fire remains in live recordings, because even the tinny sound of an iPhone obfuscates the performance less than what Jari did in the studio. The epic climactic solo is robbed of its impact not only by the awful production but also because we’ve already heard it.
I hate everything about this album, but I cannot bring myself to hate Jari himself. My words have been extremely unkind but I refuse to ignore the fact that he is a phenomenal guitarist. No amount of controversy about saunas and broken promises can make me deny that. The only person denying his immense skill on the instrument is himself, making every effort to downplay it. From the plodding ballads which show his vocal inadequacies to the “VST plugin demo” orchestral arrangements, it seems like the last thing he wants is to be seen as is a shredder.
I’ll close this review/postmortem with an excerpt from Jari’s best song, the fittingly titled “Battle Against Time” from all the way back in 2004. Twenty years ago.
"So much fire left inside,
So much left undone
guitar solo"
