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

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.