Review by Rexorcist for Amorphis - Under the Red Cloud (2015)

I'm not planning on starting a Metal Academy hall on this, but there's just enough scattered throughout this album for me to call it a death metal album.  But much of it builds itself on softer vocals, much like Ulver did with black metal, but lacking reverb.  While many of the same elements are shared across the ten songs, including the random shifting between prog and melo-death, and occasional folsky elements, there are certain elements that make it hard to pick favorites among the batch, such as the occasional Arabic touches in Enemy at the Gates and Death of a King (and milder levels of it in White Night), as well as the Celtic metal sound of Tree of Ages.  As well, there's a level of melody hear that I have to say utterly astounded me as a prog metal fan.  While it maintains strong accessibility, it carefully molds all of the essential Amorphis elements together into, as one reviewer here put it, alchemically (I'm using this fake word and no one's stopping me).  As an FMA fan, I have to say that the melody here reaches Philosopher's Stone levels of purity.  Still, it's impossible not to notice a formula here that makes things a little predictable at the end, but they certainly nailed rocking the formula.  I may have to re-evaluate Elegy, but this is currently my favorite Amorphis album (and maybe my favorite Amorphis album cover).

98