Review by Sonny for Amorphis - Tales From the Thousand Lakes (1994)

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.