Amorphis - Tales From the Thousand Lakes (1994)^{Release ID: 2463}

An incredibly unique and creative album that defies the genres normal aggressive tendencies

Back in 1994 things were very different when it came to acquiring metal music. I certainly couldn't connect to the internet and download 468 albums in a day (most of which I will never even listen to) to try to find a new favourite. I couldn't get on to sites like Rate Your Music to find out what others considered to be the most worthwhile albums to acquire. The only options we had were monthly magazine reviews along with good old trial and error. I remember the day very clearly when I picked Amorphis' Tales From the Thousand Lakes out of the extremely limited metal section at my local record store, thought that the cover looked pretty cool, and decided to take a punt. A few hours later, I think my whole concept of music had been forever changed!

Tales From the Thousand Lakes is most definitely a death metal album. But then strangely, it has no real aggression whatsoever. It doesn't attempt to be evil or dark, nor does it attempt to be violent or rebellious. Most death metal music that I'd been listening to at the time (we're talking about bands such as Morbid Angel, Carcass, Deicide, Suffocation etc.) could be considered oppressive music that's more likely to kick your ass than calm you down. Amorphis' album, while still containing base elements of death metal, contained masses of pleasant melodies, copious amounts of musical creativity and a level of innocence that I'd never experience in my beloved genre of destruction. But instead of being completely put off by what I was hearing, I was entirely transfixed and just couldn't stop myself from pressing play again and again.

To this day, I'm still not sure I've heard an album that sounds quite like this one. The songs are extremely catchy, and the melodies are just exquisite. There are various vocal styles utilized (death growls, cleanly sung, female) and various sounds thrown into the mix including keyboards and even a moog. The lyrics are all based on the Finnish national pole book which is called Kalevala and can be considered cute and strange, but entirely fitting for the wonderfully unique music they accompany. I think the current Rate Your Music genre classifications for the album are spot on. Melodic Death Metal as primary with Folk Metal, Progressive Metal and Death Doom Metal all as secondary. I think you'd be hard pressed to find another album that fits into all those categories and certainly not one that sounds as natural as this one.

Tales From the Thousand Lakes is a landmark album not only for the world of metal music in general, but for my musical development in particular. I still love the album completely today and have listened to it hundreds of times without ever getting bored. Amorphis have created many good albums since this one but I don't believe they've ever created anything this good again. If you've never experienced it and you think you can handle some very melodic death metal, then do yourself a favour and pick this album up. Highlights for me are the wonderful intro Thousand Lakes, The Castaway, Black Winter Day and Drowned Maid, but every track is gold in my opinion. A definite 5-star album!

Amorphis was one of the first death metal bands I checked out, largely due to having gone through many death metal lyrics to find cleaner bands.  It's been ages since I returned to this album, and that's mostly due to the fact that I was turned off by them when I realized they gave up the death in place of becoming a formulaic prog band.  I love prog metal, but I was using Amorphis to explore new territory, so since they were covering more familiar territory, I gave up on them.  But now that I'm on a death kick, I'm finally giving their second and third albums another go.

To me, melodeath is a good excuse fore a death band to steer towards outsider influences for variety, pizazz and thematic depth.  We get that with Tales from the Thousand Lakes.  The album makes a point of prioritizing a folksy, mythical and slightly medieval feel over the brutality and heaviness of death.  This gives the album a unique touch for the early days of melodeath, and helped the genre overall.  This also gives the album a reason to be catchy and accessible without falling into radio behavior like Dark Tranquillity eventually did.  Unfortunately, this is also a hinderance to the album's overall extremity.  Our fantasy vibe here might appeal to fans of mythical music, but I can understand why some death fans would be turned off by this when they want their death metal blasting like hell, which is something melodeath bands can also do, like Edge of Sanity.

Anyway, this album has a lot of good about it in the creativity department, and because of that it'll always stand out as a stepping stone in the early development of melodeath.  But it needs to be heavier, so it's definitely not perfect.  But if you like melodic metal in general, then I will easily recommend this, even more so as an introductory album into death metal for the uninitiated.

I am finally on a bit more familiar territory with an album I have known for quite a while. Tales From the Thousand Lakes is actually one of the first albums I got into when, after a hiatus of several years, I ventured back into metal in the late nineties and it was one of those I got a dodgy copy of using that new-fangled Napster thingy, so beloved by Lars Ulrich & co.

Tales... is the band's sophomore full-length, following 1992's The Karelian Isthmus and is a concept album based around the Finnish national epic poem known as The Kalevala. The first half of the nineties found most death metal bands pushing the boundaries of extremity, whether through increasing technicality, plumbing greater depths of cavernous doominess or just sheer bloody-minded brutality, becoming more and more extreme seemed to be the order of the day. Amorphis, however, pursued another route entirely, whereby the story was the key and the music to express it needed to be more accessible and expansive than mere technicality or brutality would allow. Tales From the Thousand Lakes is absolutely rooted in death metal, but it also has much more going on. The darkness of violence, blasphemy and evil which were the staples of death metal's ethos and aesthetic up to this point are entirely absent and TFtTL has a far lighter and airier feel that any death metal I have heard that was produced prior to this. It displays an epic nature that borrows from classic heavy metal and even Candlemass' style of epic doom metal with an expansive style that suits the material beautifully and breaks the mould for death metal, the songs incorporating a previously unknown level of melodicism into the genre. As a consequence every track has it's own atmosphere, yet they all flow together magically, to produce a coherent and consistent album that is accessible, aesthetically pleasing and incredibly memorable. Into a death metal-based foundation is woven folk metal and progressive elements with a variety of vocal styles from DM's usual deep growls to soaring cleans and a creative use of keyboards at key points without overdoing this side of things. This is a point that needs emphasising, I think, despite using potentially cheesy and overblown styles like folk and progressive metal, the album itself never descends to cartoonishness and is incredibly restrained and tasteful throughout it's runtime.

Undoubtedly Thousand Lakes was incredibly influential and I wouldn't be at all surprised if fellow Finns and symphonic metal flag-bearers Nightwish weren't heavily influenced by it, along with any number of more obvious melodic death metal outfits. This is assuredly a lightning-in-a-bottle, one-of-a-kind album that any number of bands (including Amorphis themselves) have attempted and failed to replicate anything like as successfully and it is a testament to original songwriting and strong storytelling emerging from the extreme metal scene of the 1990s. A classic of melodic and atmospheric extreme metal.

It’s been many years since I’ve revisited the highly regarded 1994 sophomore album from Finland’s Amorphis. “Tales From The Thousand Lakes” was a very big record in my household back in the day but I recall it being a much more important release for my younger brother Ben than it was for myself. I certainly rmember finding it to be a very creative & inventive effort (particularly melodically) however I don’t think I was the target audience Amorphis had in mind when they wrote it, despite my being quite fond of their earlier work which was closer to your classic death metal model. If I had to guess at what score I’d end up awarding it though I would have been pretty confident of it being a 4/5 so I went into this re-evaluation exercise with the expectation of a rewarding outcome.

“Tales From The Thousand Lakes” kicks off with a beautifully executed darkwave piece by the name of “Thousand Lakes” which I really enjoy & it sets the scene nicely for what’s to come. The more melodic end of death metal has been something that I’ve had a rocky relationship with over the years though & it took me a few tracks to find my feet once the metal material kicked off to tell you the truth. I had no trouble recalling just about every note of the album once I got my teeth into it as the hooks entrenched themselves in me from a relatively young age but I think I’d forgotten that I didn’t buy into Amorphis as much as the metalheads around me did, at least not at that point in their evolution. Thankfully things start to really get cracking as we approach the middle of the record with the one-two punch of “First Doom” & album highlight “Black Winter Day” which saw my attention being fully engaged for the first time but despite the fact that there’s only one track of the ten on the tracklisting that I don’t get much out of (ironically one of the more popular tracks in the folky “The Castaway”) I’d be lying if I said that I ever find myself kneeling at the altar of Amorphis’ here.

So why is that? I certainly admire the record from a creative point of view as it sounded so unlike anything else that was around at the time & seems to succeed in most of its more expansive musical endeavours. I think it’s that some of those endeavours take Amorphis into more accessible territories that have me hesitating to jump on the train as it’s moving slowly out from the station though. You see, while “Tales From The Thousand Lakes” is generally tagged as melodic death metal, there are a lot more elements at play here. The doom/death metal sound of Paradise Lost is the most obvious point of reference & I really enjoy the more crushing doom sections. There are a few crunchy Swedish death metal moments too which can’t be a bad thing but there are also some less imposing influences on display. I really enjoy the clean vocals & think they add greatly to the infectiousness of Amorphis’ sound here. The prog rock influences are generally refreshing too but are a little hit & miss in their execution, particularly in the use of keyboards which can bounce from being a masterstroke to being a touch underwhelming in fairly quick time. Perhaps unsurprisingly though, the incorporation of folk melodies in several of the songs is something that I find a little difficult to stomach as folk metal has never been my bag. Tomi Koivusaari’s death growls aren’t particularly interesting either. In fact, I’m tempted to suggest that they sound pretty generic which perhaps goes a fair way to explaining why I enjoy the clean vocals so much.

Amorphis would go on to move away from death metal entirely over the next couple of records by focusing their attention on a more progressive sound. Their 1996 third album “Elegy” would be somewhat of a transition album in that regard but I’ve always remembered it as being a step up from “Tales From The Thousand Lakes” from a creative point of view. Perhaps that’s simply a case of misguided nostalgia & I might make a point of revisiting that album some time soon so as to see how it compares but there can be no doubt that its predecessor was a resounding success in its own right. It’s perhaps a touch too melodic for my taste but “Tales From The Thousand Lakes” certainly compares very well with other prominent melodeath releases & would still make my all-time top ten for the subgenre overall at this point.

Might just be one of the best and most atmospheric melodeath albums of all time. Amorphis combine a lot of influences here (death metal, doom, 70s prog, Finnish folk) that all unite to form a rich, dark atmosphere that grips you from the first note. Melodic and insanely memorable riffs, deep and resonant growls, tasteful keys, epic lyrics. Don't miss the "Moon and Sun" bonus tracks, which are true highlights.