Review Summary: Wake up, Tony!
Now, I wouldn’t have bothered with reviewing Talviyö of all things if I couldn’t build at least a mild defense case for the album. Of course, do not expect me to hail it as an overlooked masterpiece, too good for the pleb to understand. I do agree with all the main critical points. The production is muddy and lifeless, Tony sounds drowsy most of the time, and the songwriting… well, that’s where I beg to differ a bit.
You see, none of the songs on Talviyö are hopeless. In fact, I would argue that almost every song contains a seed of greatness. It’s just that the band was unable to get those seeds to bloom most of the time, but the potential is still there. To me, the closer “The Garden” is the least salvageable song on the album, being a boring ballad and a retread of other Sonata’s boring ballads from olden days, such as “Alone in Heaven.” Even still, a lady credited mononimously as Hilla on Discogs does her best to elevate the song with her vocals, but she can not fight off the blandness on her own.
Otherwise though, even the worst songs on Talviyö have some redeeming features. I will not cover all of them, but let’s consider the worst offenders and try to find something good about them. “The Raven Still Flies with You” is a dull, overlong song with boring riffage, but it still has quite a touching chorus. The emotional impact is crazily uneven, but it’s still there. “Who Failed the Most” is built around the most generic keyboard melody, which is still serviceable and could have been expanded into something genuinely catchy if the band just showed more creativity. The way it turned out though, any third-rate power metal band could have written a song like that one or “A Little Less Understanding.” Which is the main issue for me, not the bad production or Tony’s “I’m sorry, I just woke up” singing. Sonata’s been prone to overwriting their songs for quite some time, especially on their late 2000s albums when Tony wanted to do prog, but this time the band sticks to basics too much when the material present on the album clearly required some development. Such is the case with “Demon’s Cage” that starts off bland but contains a nice heavier passage where the guitars go VROOM VROOM and even Tony rises from his slumber for a while. Again, could have been a great song if the band didn’t choose to bury it under some more cheap keyboard melodies and childish lyrics. Dear Tony, if you deemed it necessary to include a glorious “you can kiss my ass” line in one of your songs, please at least have the nerve to sing it properly instead of whispering the very mild obscenity under your nose like a bashful teenager.
Then again, there are some actually good songs here, and not even Tony’s snoring could bring them down. I would say that in terms of sheer number of enjoyable songs Talviyö overtakes “The Ninth Hour,” although that album sounded better, of course. “Storm the Armada” is an obvious highlight, and so is the spry and lively instrumental “Ismo's Got Good Reactors,” but that’s not all. The opener “Message from the Sun” is actually a good start with nice winter landscape lyrics, and of course, there is a Caleb song. I find the songs related to Caleb saga especially enjoyable even on the band’s weaker albums, and “The Last of the Lambs” is no exception. It is a great slow-burner, a dark and brooding song with cool melodies and catchy delivery by Tony. It is also quite unusual and hard to classify in terms of the genre or style.
Okay, honestly, I give up. This is a super bland album, and a few good songs can’t change that. I just don’t think “Talviyö” deserves to be trampled into the ground as it was immediately upon release, but maybe we just expect more from Sonata Arctica than, say, from Evergrey, whose recent output is equally bland. Also, I think metalheads would have been able to forgive a lot of things, muddy production included, but not the perpetual laziness that permeates the album even in its better moments. To me, the band hasn’t been the same ever since Liimatainen’s departure, but never before have they released an album that sounds like it was recorded in Jari Mäenpää’s sauna.
