Tales from the Thousand Lakes

It's a special thing when an album can fully immerse you. Some albums build toward that immersion slowly and benefit from interludes and close study of the lyrics, and others seem to possess the ability to transport you to another world from the opening note, less like settling into a novel and more like walking through a portal. Tales from the Thousand Lakes is one such album.

Lyrics plucked from the verses of the Kalevala, the Finnish epic poem, provide a figurative and elegant base for the band to build a beautiful, old-world atmosphere around. It's not a linear story told across the songs, but having all originated from the same place there is nevertheless a very conceptual, cohesive feel. Themes of folk stoicism, the sense of time passing both for individuals and the world as a whole, universal good and evil, sorrow, but also wisdom and acceptance.

On the surface most of the album is straightforward musically, not overly technical in performance or composition, but the way the band layers simple grooves and melodies is sublime, achieving a profundity that is much more than the sum of its parts. When there's a soaring melody it's never cheesy, when it's heavy it never feels too obvious. Even when it's an upbeat groove or what appears to be a standard death metal chug, it's never "fun" in a rock n' roll way, nor is it "heavy" in the most typical death metal sense, but instead comes from a place that is more neutral, much like the folk stories it's paired with, and is more powerful because of it. These aspects make Tales from the Thousand Lakes sort of difficult to draw comparisons to; it's clearly death metal, but it's not old school DM sonically or spiritually, nor is it melodic death metal in the way that genre's come to be known despite the abundance of melody. You'll find similarities in some of the works of contemporaries from that era, like compatriots Demigod, or Sweden's Gorement, but still those are more firmly rooted in traditional death metal than where Amorphis was at as of TftTL. Progressive death metal is probably the best label even though TftTL is devoid of technical exercises, long songs, and so on. There are plenty of hooks and memorable segments, and with the relatively short running time no songs outstay their welcome.

It's funny, in a way the closest comparison I can provide for the way this album makes me feel is Fates Warning's Awaken the Guardian, though of course Awaken the Guardian bears no musical resemblance to this whatsoever, so don't let that turn you off (or on). It's something about the atmosphere of the album being at once timeless and lost in time, the music being unique and transportive, and I guess me connecting these two must also have something to do with their respective album art sharing a similar style, color palette, and sense of magic. Fear not, there's no John Arch to be found here, I'm speaking strictly in terms of the aura that accompanies the album. It's something special. Speaking of clean vocals though, they are present, but they're used sparingly and to great effect -- again not technical, more "folk" in style, not overly emotive but still moving.

I've seen a few gripes on here about the production but I find it to be well suited to the music. It's certainly not modern but it has a pleasing organic feel, being neither lo-fi nor particularly polished. It's a mid 90s Sunlight Studios production and sounds the part.

Amorphis would expand on the ideas found here with Elegy (which is also excellent), but there is a particular atmosphere to this album that you won't find elsewhere in Amorphis' discography (except maybe the Black Winter Day EP) or in the greater realm of death metal, and this is my favorite of theirs. Take a moment to absorb the artwork which serves to set the mood perfectly, then step through the mystic gate into the moonlight of ancient Karelia.

The English language is a detailed, beautiful, intricate gift to the art of communication, sometimes mastered and romanced by Maestros of Verbosity, and sometimes under-used and mis-represented by those who simply can't find enough words and diversity to speak their mind (of which this reviewer is deeply guilty).

Sometimes, there aren't even enough words and descriptors to even comprehend the feelings and emotions through such simple wordplay. Without the slightest shade of a doubt, this album is absolutely one of those moments where no words can document the absolute momentousness of the unfurling atmosphere before me.

"Tales" is littered with the kind of finesse that no group of musicians should be able to produce a mere three years into their inception. The Introduction is beautiful and very mysterious, carving both a sense of wonder and an eerie intrepidness. It seems to use a synthesizer to present a foggy-sounding motif, laced with female choral effects and bells. The tones and effects aren’t something I am able to place, but the mood on the opener is, and it genuinely sounds like the album art.

As openers go, you can do significantly worse than “Into Hiding”. It’s one of the last carryovers from the doom/death era, as it starts with a melodic guitar riff, before spiralling into Tomi’s trademarked growls. The chorus is ripe with clean vocal goodness, marking one of the groups live favourites to this very day. The juxtaposition between this and the catchy melody is notable as a suitable avatar for Amorphis’ sound, even 30 years along. The general formula of the above is the main crest that Amorphis proudly wear; often adding instruments to further the heaviness (or melody – delete as applicable) of the particular song. The formula doesn’t always work though as “First Doom” remains the sole track on here that hasn’t managed to cement itself into my heart. As great as it would be on albums prior, it doesn’t seem to fit here, forging a rare disconnect between story and listener.

Then we have other classics such as “Black Winter Day” and “Drowned Maid” which follow the well-trodden path of pacey, Indulgent melo-death with Atmosphere.The album is well remembered and well-loved for a variety of reasons (it’s rather rare for every track to be instantly recallable or at the very least, familiar) on hearing the first few notes. Rarer still is it for them to be looked upon with an overall fondness usually reserved for a happy childhood memory.

What truly, truly makes this album worthy of the Pantheon it finds itself on is the atmosphere, contributed largely towards by the production. The guitars are mixed perfectly, being fully audible and at centre stage, without the sacrifice of the supporting instrumentation. Every note of the bass is crystal clear and thunderous when it needs to be. The drums are pronounced and the three fully perform their roles as time and rhythm keepers flawlessly. Tomi’s vocals are also clear and stand out above all of the instruments without making any any into noisy spectators. The effects and at times unusual sounds push this album way out of the boundaries of any standard metal trope, and again, it has an uncanny knack of actually sounding like the album art does – mysterious, foggy, but inviting and otherworldly.

I also recommend the closer "Magic and Mayhem" for a perfect example of the albums flavour. An epic guitar lead plays throughout, recalling that Iron Butterfly classic whose name I forget. Once again, the unusual synth sound separates the intro and first few bars. As the song begins, it becomes a much heavier death metal piece, with doomy guitars and more death growls by Tomi. There's even a guitar "wah" every couple of bars which I don't recall hearing anywhere else in Amorphis' early catalogue.

However, not everything is idyllic and sensual. For some reason, the band decided to include a cover of "Light My Fire" by the Doors. It doesn't add anything to the zeitgeist of this release and quite frankly would be better as a B-side to an earlier or later single release. It's fine, I suppose, but just doesn't go with the rest of the album. I suppose if I am being critical, I can acknowledge that it gives the artists an extra opportunity to showcase their diverse array of influences and abilities.

The majesty of this album is a hill I will absolutely die on, not only securing a "comfy" sensation when listened to, but somehow improving on each listen, with every song giving up more of its secrets. Therefore, Amorphis' only true flirtation with melodic death metal has left so so many people wondering "What If?", but as we all know, this wasn't the path for Amorphis to continue down.

Definitely a case of "Smile, Because it Happened!". It even sounds like the album cover - so grab your Fishing Rods and your Wicker Hat as a calming, one-of-a-kind experience is located within this Pandora's Box. Instead of Cenobites, we get inspired and unique Metal, forged from the famous words of the hallowed Kalevala.

Tales From the Thousand Lakes is a wonderful mixture of tradition and progression. Amorphis expertly blends the historically tried and tested stories of the ancient Finnish epic poem 'Kalevala' with classic death metal structures, melodic leads, folk metal influences, and creatively interwoven synth sections. It has gained controversy for its less than original lyrics, but the entire purpose of the album is to allow the majesty of the land of heroes to resonate within the listeners. Without these supposedly unoriginal lyrics, the story of Kalevala would not be accurately painted throughout the album. To me, it also echoes the ancient practice of bards and minstrels (including those found throughout the poem) of retelling stories of the past, not changing their content but changing their emotional impact. All in all, the album is an easy but beautiful listen.

This being Amorphis' second full album, it was clear when it was released that their music style would be changing considerably from that of their first album, Karelian Isthmus, which features more death/thrash centred tracks. Tales From the Thousand Lakes deviates considerably from their debut, retaining its death metal foundation in its vocals and tuned down guitar but experimenting with folk, melodic, and pop influences. The songs employ a mixture of classic death metal growled vocals and the clean, soaring choruses seen in more modern melodeath, which provide powerful, mystical ambience. The rhythm guitar is distorted and low, while the lead follows a non-distorted, concise, subtle melody and complements the vocals. This contrast perfectly manipulates each song into its own story of sound and rhythm. The keyboard broadens the feeling of the music, contributing a feeling of grandness and purpose, much like the fantastical nature of the original poem.

After a few listens, the listener truly feels a sense of awe at the grandiose nature of the album. It connects the listener to the magnificent mythos of the time of minstrels, warriors, gods, and heroes, making those magical fantasies we can only daydream about seem much closer. The poetic simplicity of the lyrics makes for an emotional aspect, especially in songs like Drowned Maid and Black Winter Day. The almost bittersweet melodies add to this uncomplicated emotion.

Though the album is full of amazing tracks, the mixing does not always do the music justice- on occasion it can feel as though the various parts are haphazardly stacked on top of each other rather than being interwoven together to make on product. There are also slight imperfections in the drums and the clean vocals. However, this barely dectracts from the quality of the album, though it does roughen it a bit.

This album would prove a stepping stone in the evolution into the modern, melodic band that it has become today. It will always remain a classic, and one of the pioneers of both melodeath and experimentation with less heavy aspects of metal.

After "The Karelian Isthmus" released, there were already a few signs of Amorphis potentially transitioning into something slightly different from their former death metal/death-doom roots. "Tales from the Thousand Lakes" does not eliminate all of their former sound, but builds on it in a way that gives the album an even more epic feel, very full of underlying atmosphere. Blending styles such as melodic death, progressive, doom and even folk metal all in one, this is where the band started to feel more comfortable exploring their preferred musical tastes further.

The album sets itself apart quite easily from Amorphis' previous works with the heavily increased usage in keyboards per Kasper Mårtenson that give it a more magical and enchanting feel, as shown best in tracks such as Black Winter Day, The Castaway, and Forgotten Sunrise. Also notable is the inclusion of clean vocals here, done by Ville Tuomi, considering the band would never go without including them again; even then, the mix between clean and harsh vocals was a change that would definitely come to be appreciated. Tomi Koivusaari's growls are in a league of their own to be honest. It kind of reminds me of what Edge of Sanity (Dan Swanö) themselves were doing around the same time. The twin guitar harmonies here are rather memorable, with riffs such as the ones in Drowned Maid and Into Hiding that come to mind. Jan Rechberger's performance on drums is solid, with a pounding sound that doesn't lose out to the mix, and Olli-Pekka Laine's bass provides a strong backing for the sound of the album, also solid. Esa Holopainen's guitar work does hold weight here too, his riffs here give off a feel of what early death-doom pioneers worked with, and it only adds on to the great influences Amorphis had in mind.

The lyrical content is also something I had grown to admire very well. Inspiration from the Kalevala was not and still may not be something that I've always seen when it comes to metal, although it is easy to imagine more Finnish bands have taken inspiration from it since then. Perhaps the lyrics here may seem silly to some at first, but I would say referring to the words of the Kalevala makes the album feel so much closer to it, evoking a gradual sense of wonder that does carry over to later releases. On a side note, the production in itself is rather nice even though it comes off as a bit raw compared to other works of the time, it can still be very manageable to listen to. It gets better from here, and it wasn't bad to start with.

Being aware Tales is like a concept album in of itself, expressing a sense of pride in Finnish mythology and folklore, relatively new territory to metal was tapped here while. Definitely not a bad thing seeing this in a way become their shtick, it is nice seeing bands be able to stand out for whatever reason, whether it be musicianship or inspiration. We probably wouldn't have gotten the legendary albums we did if the band never considered using the Kalevala as an influence, or maybe we would have gotten something similar, who knows?

For an album that was released in 1994, it arrived around the early years of melodic death metal that would soon see a rise within the Gothenburg scene, and was for the most part pioneered by Carcass as well. With the previous styles mentioned earlier put together into one thing, it is hard to deny Amorphis quickly made something distinctive within the metal scene at the time. All in all, I would say Amorphis made the right decision to experiment with their sound rather than stay confined to only one identifiable one; not that sticking to one style is bad, but the transition shown on Tales proved that the band could discover new depths and still retain what made them what they were and still are.

Amorphis has always flown under the radar for me. I own one of their later albums and wanted to dive into what made them so great to begin with. I have their re-recorded "Tales from the Thousand Lakes", but to offer a proper opinion on that I felt like I needed to listen to the original. I thought this would be some death metal classic, pushing the boundaries of death/doom. Instead, I received an album that does not age well despite coming from some super talented musicians. I was disappointed with this record in the end, but it's listenable.

I do want to say that the album cover matches the music perfectly. Throughout the duration I felt like the music was being performed on some cold autumn night in a 1700s town square. The atmosphere on this record is stellar. The keyboard and organ sections are a nice touch and really help the more monotone songs stand out. While I appreciate the outstanding melodies, much of the time is spent on repeating the same rhythm. Many of the tracks sound a bit dull after a while until a keyboard pops in and then I'm on board again.

Those melodies though are really something special. No matter what era of Amorphis I listen to it seems that they have fantastic lead work. I can't give a direct example of this because it takes place throughout the entire record. These guys absolutely nail atmosphere for whatever kind of album they make and I respect that. This also blends into the keyboard and organs that I mentioned before. They utilize those instruments as the main focus on some songs. "To Fathers Cabin" is a really simple tune that is interrupted by some great organ work and "Magic and Mayhem" is basically the same instead with keyboards. There is almost a folky feel to some songs as well, like in "The Castaway". Every song sounds unique and distinct from the one before it.

There is absolutely no substance to the lyrics. Many of them are repeated often and could be comprised of only a few lines. Despite this, some of those songs can be almost five minutes long. The harsh vocals by Tomi Koivusaari sound like 90s death metal, but these clean sections sound awful. Thankfully it's only on a couple of the songs, but you'll definitely raise an eyebrow and catch you off guard. While I appreciate the tone of this album sounding like it was recorded a few hundred years ago, those clean vocals take you completely out of the album whenever they pop up.

Overall, I feel like I was expecting to be blown away and I definitely wasn't. I'm now looking forward to listening to the re-recorded version to see if they fixed anything. This album isn't a dumpster fire, but it can get a little repetitious and the clean singing is abysmal. There are some cool ideas here and the atmosphere really pulls you in. At the end of the day, I feel like this album is good, but far from great.

Recs: "The Castaway", "First Doom", "Forgotten Sunrise", "Magic and Mayhem"

Dawson's Creek is an American teen soap opera from the 90's. Most of the time it deals with first world problems of pretty white boys and girls that tend to pompously analyze each and every petty event of their insignificant lives as if the fate of the world depends on it. Most of the characters walk around with an overblown, unrealistic sense of self-importance and magnify every tiny event in their lives to extremely high measures, in order to provoke some drama in their utterly boring life. Basically, it's a fantastically pathetic attempt at melodrama. You know what else is a fantastically pathetic attempt at melodrama? This album.

'Tales From The Thousand Lakes' is an album full of overt attempts to fake a sense of drama, but it ends up being one of the most try hard albums I've ever heard. There are so many bizarre moments here that I wasn't sure if this album was meant to be taken seriously, or maybe it's just a dragging joke that goes nowhere.

Besides a couple of songs, all the lyrics are copy pasted from an old book called "Kalevala". What a lesser attempt at trying to create a concept album! You can't just recite words from a two-hundred years book and call it a concept album! What about coming up with your own interpretation of the story, and creating something original? Give me a break. That odd combination of simply reciting sections of the book through deadpan growling, feels so contrived and pointless, they could have just read the phone book and get the exact same result. In addition to the deadpan cookie monster growling, there's a really annoying clean vocalist here and there that is a serious pain in the ear. That vocalist has a very nasal and whiny tone, I have no idea who's this guy but I hope he kept his day job. That whole combination of randomly switching between growl and clean vocals that simply recite lyrics of an old book while there's zero change in the mood of the instrumental part of the album, feels like a ridiculous and uninspired attempt at creating some sort of mystic atmosphere. Moreover, most of the clean vocal lines are so unimaginative and bland anyway, there's nothing "metal" about them and they aren't catchy at all to be called pop/rock. Just random melodic lines that goes nowhere and exist only to create a contrived contrast to the growling, just for the sake of it.

Regarding the riffs and keyboards, this album had the most cringe-worthy attempt at creating mysterious vibe that I've ever heard. For an intro, there's an instrumental track that repeat a simple 3 seconds keyboard theme for maybe 30 times throughout the whole of this yawn. There are some bells and pads thrown at the background to try to reach some sort of epicness, but this whole track feels like a bad clich?. Maybe in 1994 this could sound like a "cool" intro, but in 2020 it sounds like a tween who found an old Casio keyboard in his daddy's basement and did his best to worship Burzum's experimental period in jail.

Most of the songs follow a simple formula of having one guitar playing dumb power chords patterns while another guitar is playing some sort of minor scales improvisation at higher octave. There aren't any connecting dots between one theme and another, the riffs just flow aimlessly one after another never reaching any climax or some sort of decent melodic line, just a bag of redundant ideas that sound as uninspired as possible.

In "Drowned Maid" for example, we get to hear the same 5 notes theme repeat itself for half a minute, then the same theme gets recycled again just a few steps higher along with cheesy keyboards and muffled growling. That feels like a failed attempt at creating drama, while there's no reason or excuse for that. Zero emotional content.

"Black Winter Day" has an extremely irritating main melody that repeat itself too much. The growling has no depth and the clean vocal lines are flat and sound even more terrible than it should due to the highly nasal and squeaky timbre of the vocalist. On a side note, the video clip of this song is one of the most deadpan clips I've ever seen, no essence, no clear plot, just a collection of dusty shots that try too hard to deliver some sort of epic vibe but end up being a gigantic yawn. Just like the whole album is.

The one thing that irritated me the most in this album, is the horrible keyboard sounds that combined with the pathetic and unimaginative melodic ideas that are thrown all over the place throughout this album, created an extravaganza of redundant cheesiness that just make things worse. I have no idea what keyboards they used in this album or how it was recorded and processed, but in 1994 it was possible to achieve a way better sound. All the synth pads and leads sound so corny and juvenile, the piano sounds like plastic and the emulation of other acoustic instruments is just a bad joke.

Maybe for a lot of people in 1994 this album sounded less corny and immature, but for me in 2020 it sound like a disastrous failed experiment that certainly didn't pass the test of time. The vocals sound detached from the copy pasted lyrics, the guitar sound detached from the corny keyboards and there's a chronic repetition through the whole album over some very bland ideas that doesn't feel connected to one another and sound like a big mess. There's a great sense of trying too hard to sound deep and melodic for the whole running length of this album, but it ended up as a being a contrived and fantastically pathetic attempt at evoking drama with amazingly retarded and unfocused songwriting backed by an awful production.

It's clear that 'Tales from the Thousand Lakes' certainly divides opinions.

As of today, ‘Tales from the Thousand Lakes’ only has a higher percentage rating than two other Amorphis albums: the admittedly patchy ‘Far from the Sun’ and the actually quite excellent ‘Circle’. This makes it, overall, the third worst rated album in Amorphis’s oeuvre, even under the fairly shonky and thematically lost soft-rock album ‘Am Universum’ and the mundane and tired boredom of ‘The Beginning of Times’.

To put it another way, a staggering 10 Amorphis albums are rated at an average higher than the seminal magic of ‘Tales from the Thousand Lakes’! This doesn't chime at all with my view of the album, as I consider it one of Amorphis' greatest works.

‘Tales from the Thousand Lakes’ is a masterpiece of melodic metal, and a hugely influential work. Released in the dark days of 1994, when contemporaries like Moonspell, In Flames, and My Dying Bride were all finding their musical feet, it is a fantastic example of youthful ambition and creativity during an amazing time for dark metal. Perhaps shaping my view, I purchased my copy in 1995 at the impressionable age of 15. Yet I also remember at the time that there was huge praise for this album from the metal press and (perhaps just as reliably) word of mouth from fellow metal acolytes. It was a real moment in time.

All albums must be judged on their own merits, and rightly so, yet it’s also important to recognise the context and time period of release. Put simply, bands weren’t doing this sort of thing in 1994. Amorphis were breaking new ground and it was so exciting.

The opening instrumental ‘Thousand Lakes’ acts as a gateway to a different world, where the listener is drawn into a semi-mythical, semi-historical Karelia from hundreds of years ago. The haunting keyboards and bell sounds are transformative, and regardless of my mood or location, I’m immediately brought back to that magical realm.

The inclusion of keyboards throughout the album was a masterstroke after the interesting but fairly chugging immaturity of ‘The Karelian Isthmus’. The introduction of Kasper Martenson on the ivories was a bold move, definitely, but such a brilliant one. All of the songs receive an emotive boost that contributes to the creation of the world of the album. Like the best moments by Iron Maiden, Opeth and Burzum, you feel drawn into the world of the music, like you’re on some kind of aural adventure that transcends a mere listening experience.

‘Into Hiding’ launches with engaging melodic guitar runs and the introduction of the obscure yet emotive clean vocals of Ville Tuomi to contrast the atmospheric growls of Tomi Koivusaari, which elevates the track to something of a dark anthem. ‘The Castaway’ and ‘In the Beginning’ combine melody with driving energy. This album just turns the screw on the emotion, and you can feel it in the pit of your stomach. There's a melancholy present throughout the tracks.

Possibly the highlights are the single ‘Black Winter Day’ with its twisting and turning keyboard riff and triumphant chorus, as well as ‘Drowned Maid’ with its superior melodies, heavy feel and, again, compelling chorus.

Of supreme importance was the band’s decision to eschew their own, admittedly workman-like, lyrics in favour of extracts from the ‘Kalevala’, the text that collates the folk stories of Finland’s past. The use of verses from this text increases the historical and otherworldly atmosphere of the album considerably, such as in 'Drowned Maid' where a drowned women warns her brother to avoid the seashore. By combining the murky darkness of the melodically inclined music with the tales of the tribulations of the Northern Europeans in the Middle Ages, the melancholy of hard lives comes through with every song.

The blue themed cover artwork, depicting dark and mysterious lakes as well as the anchor motif that would become the band’s emblem, is simply beautiful. The fold-out inlay card with lyrics is also very attractive and well produced. Due to this and the ‘Black Winter Day’ EP artwork, for years afterwards my friends and I would refer to an “Amorphis blue sky” when dusk fades into the deep blue of oncoming night and the first stars glimmer.

'Tales from the Thousand Lakes' is a masterwork of melodic darkness. It conjures images of esoteric worlds and acts as a living voice of ancient Finnish culture. It's one of the band's finest moments and a great monument to an exciting time in metal.

I like Amorphis. Their debut album ("The Karelian Isthmus") is a near-classic of murky, underground death metal. Their third album "Elegy" is pretty good as well, a well-crafted metal record with excellent songs and interesting prog rock influences. These two albums are poles apart stylistically but sound like the work of the same band. The record sitting between them is "Tales from the Thousand Lakes", perhaps the band's best known (and best loved) album. The acclaim heaped on this album is strange, this is a transitional album where the transition is anything but smooth.

"Tales from the Thousand Lakes" is weighed down by failed experiments and cringe-worthy moments. The biggest problems include keyboards that sound like they were played on a toy, over-the-top cheesy melodies, and ill-fitting clean vocals. Amorphis clearly wanted to distance themselves from death metal but hadn't yet worked out how to do it. The result is a confusing mishmash of growling vocals and conventional ‘rock’ song writing (which occasionally aspires to be anthemic). The drumming is simplistic and repetitive, setting the songs up for 'big' moments (singable choruses, ostentatious melodies, etc). Everything sounds tacky. The worst songs on this album are (ironically) the most famous ones. "Black Winter Day" plods along with one of the worst keyboard breaks imaginable. "The Castaway" has melodies so sickly that I must skip it as soon as it arrives. "In the Beginning" has an intro which sounds more like a stadium rock band. I can't take any of these songs seriously.

The album is much better when Amorphis tone things down. There are a few songs on here which might get overlooked in favour of those mentioned already. "Drowned Maid" is my favourite. It has the heaviest, darkest and best riff (at the beginning at 1:39), which gives the song some death metal backbone. The melodies are assimilated better here than anywhere else, even the keyboards sound OK. "First Doom" has a heavy, gloomy feel and would have fitted on the "The Karelian Isthmus", were it not for the tambourine and synth section in the middle. "Forgotten Sunrise" is the slowest, doomiest song and has an excellent riff transition (1:15) which also reminds me of the old Amorphis. The song is derailed temporarily by dodgy keyboards halfway through, but it gets back on track for a crushing third act. These three songs and the excellent piano intro ("Thousand Lakes") hold up well and save the album somewhat.

Another positive is that everything feels thematically consistent. The production is good, a bottom-heavy death metal sound with a meaty guitar tone (recorded at Studio Sunlight). The lyrics are good; taken from an English translation of the Kalevala (Finnish national epic). This means they are naturally poetic and well-written, if a little cryptic when divorced from their original context. Taking lyrics from traditional sources and passing them down to the next generation is part of folk tradition. Amorphis expand on the folk aspects of their sound that they had already explored (with greater subtlety) on the debut. I wouldn't call “Tales from the Thousand Lakes” a folk metal album, but I wonder whether Skyclad were an influence. Many of the songs here integrate folk melodies and rhythms like Skyclad did early in their career.

I enjoy listening to this album despite the many flaws (though I skip most of the songs). It is not a good album, but it has character and energy. It was also influential on later metal, and it helped Amorphis get to "Elegy". I can see why people who like melodic death-ish metal might like this album. As for me, I'll stick with "The Karelian Isthmus".

How can timeless music sound like a product of its time? A conundrum, one must admit, but one worth considering in the light of the second Amorphis full-length, Tales from the Thousand Lakes. However, let me first of all insist upon how ass-kicking the artwork looks. Click on the full version, zoom it in if you have to, and ogle the details. That looks a bit like what this sounds like and you’d better believe that the details are all in the music too, as well as that indefinable Finnish atmosphere steaming off the naturally heated water. In that sense, the cultural and atmospheric parts of Thousand Lakes are timeless, while the musical attributes are split between contemporary influences and wider musical styles.

Both the songwriting and the playing styles owe a lot to the development of extreme and semi-extreme metal styles in Europe in the early ‘90s. Several steps further on from the well-realized common or garden death metal of debut The Karelian Isthmus (similarities abound with early Sentenced), Amorphis travelled the same path as Tiamat and Katatonia, gradually relaxing the musical intensity and integrating more elements into the sound. One cannot question the shadow of Paradise Lost looming high above the entire sauna complex, stripped to the waist and churning out brooding twin guitar doom riffs, as well as copious melodies, the most obvious of which on ‘Drowned Maid’ probably deserves payment of royalties. Nonetheless, Amorphis there form a bittersweet slugger with the borrowed ideas from Gothic, so no harm done I guess. The ubiquitous gurgling growls of Tomi Koivusaari still tie in strongly to the thriving local death metal trend, one which had not quite been touched by the Gothenburg sound by 1994 and therefore maintains darker textures and a loose, relaxed touch. For the broad musical palette, some may consider his vocals too simple and primitive, yet that concept is an important part of the album’s aura. The strained cleans that appear prominently during ‘Black Winter Day’ err much closer to folk singing than anything seen in Finnish extreme metal to that point.

Continuing on the traditional side of things, keyboards play a surprisingly pivotal role to most of the songs, shaping the deliciously detached introduction into a visual overview of the cover art, peace, scope, and tradition combining with a sense of awe that crashes to the ground as the deathly heaviness of ‘Into Hiding’ creaks to life. Those keys rarely lie dormant for long, embellishing more vigorous guitar workouts and at times voicing an epic element that wouldn’t be present with the flat sound of strings and percussion alone. Though riffs do twist and change throughout several songs, much of the detail arrives in the form of synths, piano, or moog. Allowing the progressive rock solo to close ‘In the Beginning’ and the baffling Rammstein meltdown on ‘Magic and Mayhem’ proved a little much for most fans of the doom and death subgenres, though Amorphis certainly knew how to utilize the instrument to best advantage. For evidence of how everything clicks when executed suitably, the atmospheric accompaniment to the riffs of ‘Forgotten Sunrise’ is the place to go.

As an added idea about the timelessness of Thousand Lakes, I would like to suggest that – despite all the influences already named – no other album actually sounds like this. The enormous mix of evocative features coalesces into a whole very difficult to define, which feels like it has indeed emanated from a thousand far-flung lakes. Analyzing a song like ‘Father’s Cabin’ is particularly bewildering: following the mid-paced chugging optimistically from its source, hearing the serious organ solemnizing its journey; the frantic, squirming riff flashing like fish dispersing as the mere six lines of vocals are narrated with odd emphasis; the overbearing weather of the organ shining out from behind the clouds onto the same school of sardines, then the simple pleasures of grass and rolling hills that lead on to a gust of melancholic wind as a violin blows across the robust riffing, all capped off as the piece locks into a purposeful march and finally slides to a halt. As quantified by the long instrumental section, the vocals truly mire Thousand Lakes in death metal, while the music and some deft lyrics prove to be all story-telling and wandering moods. When ‘First Doom’ juxtaposes a few very simple rock riffs (listen to the super-straight drumming of the opening movement and the tambourine that greets its return) with gloomy lead work and mystic keys, I feel as though The Mission or Fields of the Nephilim has ventured into a cave and found the bones of Neanderthals preserved in ice.

What tends to get forgotten about relics like this is that, under the surface of their odd and flawed design, there lies a wealth of reasons and culture that can’t communicate directly with the observer. Only 25 years on from its release, Thousand Lakes has become embedded in its own era. A weak drum production, diluted extreme metal elements, and questionable stylistic avenues may completely spoil the album for some listeners, but I feel that they help to give it a timeless quality, turning 40 minutes into a much more nuanced timeframe. Perhaps ending ‘Magic and Mayhem’ with the crazy keyboards was a shame, especially given the peaceful escapism of the album’s introduction, though that constitutes one of the few definite complaints I have about Thousand Lakes. A whole world exists if you have the will to explore.

I got into Amorphis backwards; I was first introduced to them a few odd years ago by the singles "House of Sleep" and "Silent Waters" and went from there. I still enjoy those songs (and the albums they're on) for what they are- straightforward pop-rock numbers with more sweet saccharine melodies and catchiness than is probably healthy to stomach. Whether or not the fact that their new era was my first exposure to the band should color what you think of my perception of the album is debatable, but it's worth mentioning nonetheless. Either way, perhaps it doesn't really matter where you start considering the fantastically varied nature of Amorphis' discography; there's just so many different styles and genres covered but, as cliched as it is, they all sound similar because all the albums incorporate that trademark Amorphis sound. That unique vibe this band gives off works well in certain contexts; the melodic death/doom setting seen on Tales from the Thousand Lakes is not one of those.

The year is 1994. Amorphis is on the heels of a musically solid (albeit lacking any standout qualities) release in The Karelian Isthmus but that was perhaps the only point in the band's history where they sounded fully comfortable playing heavy metal music; every subsequent release sounded like they were trying to distance themselves from the genre (but for some reason they always retained a small portion of it, even if the inclusion of it in a given song seemed arbitrary). Concurrently, death metal itself was having a bit of an identity crisis; Entombed just turned to beefy rock music with Wolverine Blues, Heartwork had been released and Slaughter of the Soul was on the near horizon. Melodic death metal was on its way to becoming A Thing, and this ending up laying down a lot of the groundwork for Finnish bands to come; more specifically, the melodic parts of the album still rooted in metal show a very strong connection with the more somber sections of melodic death/doom bands like Insomnium, Swallow the Sun et al. This is, in that sense, a genre-defining album; this is most certainly an album ahead of its time and a lot of this particular doomy melodic stuff on Tales from the Thousand Lakes hadn't quite been seen around yet and would end up being borrowed and incorporated by many others. The difference between this and later bands in this vein, though, is that for the aforementioned bands the style had already been established and as a concept was refined and cohesive; here, the seams are much more evident and the different styles at play within are like atoms, hovering near each other but never quite forming into a bonded molecule. It's very easy to dissect Tales from the Thousand Lakes in that sense to see exactly what makes up this melodic death/doom molecule; it's one part death metal, one part doom metal, and three parts meandering prog-rock styled melodies that would come into much fuller bloom over the next few albums. Here, where they are still behind what is for the most part a metal aesthetic, they sound horribly restricted and limp-wristed. The parts that most resemble melodic death metal in the leads and riffs are probably the weakest parts of the album overall; lacking the draw and accessibility of a good prog rock song as well as any of the punishing qualities of the death or doom metal as a result of being an insecure straddling of the two poles.

Part of the reason that the more melodic death/doom leaning songs like "Into Hiding" and "The Castaway" even being a formative example of the style can't get me going at all is because they're stitched into a horrendously assembled patchwork of more pure death and pure doom segments and songs as well as straight out upbeat rocking numbers like "In the Beginning". There's a lot of different styles being thrown into the mix suddenly and somewhat unpredictably, which I suppose is why people give this album the "progressive" tag from time to time but this is the worst kind of thing that gets dubbed as progressive- a mishmash of ideas scattered haphazardly with no real narrative tying them down. Some things work better than others ("In the Beginning" is an enjoyable tune at times even if it's really not on any deep level) and some songs such as "Magic and Mayhem" have a really nice groove that shows traces of their origins, but this is really the last time we get that true death/doom dirge sound in full form and it's only in bits and pieces. It's not quite as pummeling as it was in earlier years, either. The melodic-death-pseudo-prog that surrounds it doesn't make the listener juxtapose the two but rather notice the similarities as they're more alike than different, and it weakens the power of the death metal as a result. The production is rather thin and not really suitable for what they were trying to accomplish and the harsh vocals are reduced to a muddy gurgle that seems completely detached from everything going on around it, not really lining up with the music any way but rhythmically.

The album's structure and approach is further derailed by an additional couple of glaring and obvious flaws. The clean vocals are just...really bad. Noticeably warbly, nasally and just plain fucking weak. They're not used as frequently as they were on the album that followed, Elegy, and while I think Pasi Koskinen did cleans on that album they're equally awful; the only difference between that album and this one is on Elegy you're reminded of how bad they are all the time while Tales from the Thousand Lakes only brings it up occasionally at parties right when you're about to get with a girl. Both the clean vocals and the keyboards take the center stage of the music a few times here and there; a majority of the time they interrupt the flow of the album and are the shit thrown at the wall that didn't stick for Amorphis. The keyboard is on what, three tracks? It's just some bland, effortless sugary keyboard melodies included with no rhyme or reason as to their position and purpose in the song; that doesn't make a band "progressive" and I'm tired of that being the case with a lot of people. Melodic death metal bands are the most frequent offenders of this and I know these guys were one of the first ones to do it but being the first band to execute a bad idea isn't much to brag about, much less so when it ends up becoming a sort of stereotype of an entire fuckin' subgenre.

There's a couple dim spots of light resembling the band's golden oldies and most of the enjoyable parts of the album are the ones where they ditch the metal leanings and go super uplifting and accessible, showing the buried beginnings of their later career but this is an awfully constructed mess of an album with no idea what it wants to be. The good ideas don't work the way they should and they're surrounded by more bad ideas. Those bad ideas ended up being responsible for a lot of the trends in melodic death metal I cannot stand, and this album was the beginning of the low point of far and away the weakest point in this band's discography. If you're a fan of this album reading this, Tales from the Thousand Lakes, though ahead of its time, is an underachieving incoherent pile of consonant garbage and you should feel bad for liking it; for anyone new and unfamiliar to Amorphis' sound, start from either the latest or earliest points in the their discography; better to have your meat, potatoes, veggies and dessert eaten separately rather than to consume them as one big pile of unintelligible mush.

Today is the day of "Kalevala" here in Finland. Elias Lönnrot wrote his foreword for this Finland's national epic, that he had compiled, on February 28th in the year 1835. Finland is known as the "land of the thousand lakes", so I think you've guessed what this albm is all about... I decided to choose this, the band's second full length album for the review today, because this worked as an introduction to the band for me, simple as that.

Synthesizer introduction 'Thousand Lakes' sounds Finnish to the core. What, no death metal anymore?! No. Well, there's death metal riffage and throat-lacerating low growl vocals of rhythm guitarist Tomi Koivusaari (with legendary "rai" growls, of course), as 'Into Hiding' proves. Doomy, meaning some kind of darkly atmospheric what's seen on the album's cover artwork, heavy mid-paced death metal is what's heard first, but soon enter the sweeping melodies. Finnish to the core in their style, with some exceptions that sound Mid-Eastern, from lead guitarist Esa Holopainen's pen. The synths by Kasper Mårtenson work their magic in prog rock way. And goddamnit: Clean vocals! Yes, Kyyria's Ville Tuomi provided his individual, if not very adept, voice on some of the songs. Okay, the album is weaved from various elements, Rechberger'sand that is its potency. All this proved to be too much for some older fans, as I personally know. On this album Amorphis was at their most exceptional. The band were more adventurous as they were skilled, but that's the spirit, the soul of this highly unique album. Splendid and vast use of guitar and synthesizer sounds give every song their own, special feeling. The only negative element is the "dance beat" part on the closer 'Magic and Mayhem', which is a pretty lame idea in itself, but when executed with cheap midi sounds, it's simply appalling.

The sound is thoroughly organic. You can almost see the band playing in your living room! Every element is well audible in the mix. Olli-Pekka Laine's bass and Jan Rechberger's drumming provide sturdy backbone for the album. The cover painting is simply breathtaking, if not very Finnish scenery. The lyrics might look mythical, but usually contain everyday tips for how to live.

The album is a fine piece of Finnish metal music. In 1994 I would have gave this as big a score as possible, but not anymore, thanks to the midi tomfoolery on the last song. It just destroys the spirit of the album when it happens. This, however, doesn't obstruct me from giving 'Tales from the Thousand Lakes' the classic mark.

(originally written for ArchaicMetallurgy.com on 02/28/2008)

The second album from Amorphis is a considerable expansion of their epic and melodic style. At this point, the band's sound is no longer death metal in a true sense. Tales From the Thousand Lakes finds Amorphis incorporating Finnish folk music, a full-time keyboard player, ‘clean’ vocal parts, and progressive rock influences into a style of metal better described as atmospheric and melodic folk-influenced doom/death metal, with the growled vocals of Tomi Koivusaari remaining the only real link to death metal. Musically, there is very little association with death metal, as Amorphis have approached the album’s concept from a wider perspective of expression which works to provide the music with an aesthetic distinction and direct expression as a result of acute conceptual communication. Previous work from this band, particularly in terms of melody and dramatic composition, slightly hinted at the potential realized here, which has blossomed into a richer, more wide-ranging style that allows a broader exploration of themes.

Powerful and memorable riffs drive these songs, which most often find comfort in a steady, moderate pace and simplistic rhythmic constructions, in which the deep growling vocals blend as a shade of mood, while the drums maintain a fairly straightforward tempo without much in the way of stylistic variation, yet tastefully performed with an ear for rhythmic transition and timing, as each song discovers melodic harmony which carefully guides the way to resolution, either in the form of climactic punctuation, or gentle fade-out. The music transitions seamlessly, maintaining a gliding affect even when convergence occurs abruptly, attributable to the skillfully composed and executed riffs, which, while no longer truly speaking the language of death metal, remain firmly grounded in the spirit of metal, driving songs towards animated conclusions, with the sheen of melancholy common to Finnish metal, yet which is here more closely associated with the enlivened melancholy of Finnish folk music as expressed through the voice of classic metal.

"Waters of the sea
So much blood of mine
Fishes of the sea
So much flesh of mine"

Keyboards are now a significant feature in the music of Amorphis, functioning more than atmospheric layering through guitar shadowing, but as an instrument of illumination and occasional lead, as in the moog solo during "Black Winter Day", working in tandem with the soaring guitar melodies and solos, which, escalating the compositional dynamic through spectacular atmospheric effect, are often responsible for a song’s dramatic culmination. The captivating melodies and strong riffs sail over mostly uneventful, yet fluid and adequate, drumming, harmonizing in a unification of rhythm and tonality resulting in a solid, firm foundation upon which crystal clear melodies reach for the sky. The growling vocals rarely provide emotional dynamic, acting more as a shadow-tone expression in conjunction with the instruments, occasionally emerging with a well-placed and excitable growl to assist with an introduction to a new theme with added urgency, while the session ‘clean’ vocals, sounding perhaps like a less-masculine and less-skilled Bruce Dickinson, achieve a different shade of expression, and are generally well-placed, though a more talented vocalist would have given these sections more conviction and impact. Overall, the music, benefiting from a full, clear, organic sound courtesy of Sunlight Studios, has made quite a progression from the first album, both in range of expression and musical vision, having acquired a more graceful flow and clarity of articulation that was whispering through the debut, not yet ripe enough for proper realization; on this album, Amorphis have more effectively unified their ideas into a stronger sense of conceptual direction, with less hesitation to explore different ideas and with more confidence in their collective ability to realize those ideas.

The band have taken inspiration from ancient Finnish poetry and folklore, particularly based on the Finnish national pole book Kalevala, the themes of which center around the equilibrium of darkness and light, struggle and reward, sorrow and joy, a balance inherent to metal music, brought to life here in Amorphis’s distinct expression of foreboding gloom in the growling vocals and melancholic riffs, and life-affirming triumph in the ascending melodies and illuminating keyboards, and in the dynamic rhythmic and tonal character of the purposeful and terrifically enveloping music, which poetically flows like a cool autumn breeze and establishes an early-morning seashore atmosphere, clear like the bluest morning skies with a scope as vast as an ocean. Tales From the Thousand Lakes stands as a highly individual and mature album, a rare work of metal that manages to rise above stylistic expectations through a brave creative spirit, combining youthful ambition, brilliant imagination and musical intelligence, revealing Amorphis at the most creatively inspired and exciting moment of their artistic career.

This album is probably the most courageous one I have ever heard. One could have expected a diversified album after the death metal meets progressive doom metal album that gave birth to a legacy before, but this record is high above everything one might have thought of. This album presents us a mixture of melodic death metal with many folk influences and some progressive and psychedelic parts. There are a lot of keyboards, many sweet piano melodies, some flutes and even some electronically elements to find. There are smooth and atmospheric growls that have improved since the first album and from time to time clean male vocals but not too many. This album is truly diversified and innovating in every sense of the two words. Let's also underline that some of the songs are really catchy and that wasn't overall the case on the first record. Once again, there is no single weak track to find but the difference to the first album is that there are almost only brilliant tracks on the whole album. I would also like to point out that the album cover is one of the best ones I have ever seen and it fits perfectly to the atmosphere, lyrical concept and musical diversity of the forty minutes of genius. If you happen to like this album, you absolutely must also check out the brilliant "Black winter day" EP that was released shortly afterwards.

If one meets such a high standard it turns out to be difficult to point any song out in particular. Let me tell you that I immediately fell in love with this record. To give you nevertheless a hint of what you might expect; I would like to briefly describe the songs.

“Thousand Lakes” is haunting and eerie piano introduction with some mystic female choirs in the background. After a few seconds, you are already in a very peaceful and dreamy mood. The sound of the bells is absolutely chilling. “Into hiding” is dark metal song with some smooth growls and I wouldn’t even call this style death metal anymore. The music has a strong Arabic touch and the rhythm doesn’t stop to change in the fine details. The clean vocals used for the very first time in a song by the band give an epic touch to the song and collaborate in an amazing way with the growls. The keyboards dominate the ending of this varied track. Other bands would put so many ideas in a song with a length of ten minutes, this song doesn’t even clock at four minutes. “The castaway” has a melodic guitar riff and pumping bass guitar and varies as much musically as the song before. What one recognizes for the first time and what would be repeated in many other tracks of the record is that there are almost no lyrics in the song that concentrates pretty much on the music and its atmosphere. Decent flutes underline this courageous fact as well as a great and short guitar solo with an oriental sound. The last minutes of the song are completely slow and we hear organ and weird guitar sounds in some interludes that heavily remind of the progressive and psychedelic rock of the seventies. I would even say that these elements are close to the “Krautrock” style. “First doom” varies once again in rhythm, structure and melody and has overall a doom metal touch as the title suggests. “Black winter day” is the catchiest track on the record and convinces with an amazing piano melody and a great chorus with energizing clean vocals that shows us a lot of the future development of the band. “Drowned Maid” is much faster and almost reminds of a power metal song. It still has many breaks and slow passages throughout the song but the melodic guitar harmonies are the most stunning thing about this track that fades out with the noises of an ocean. “In the beginning” is much slower once again and has a very majestic atmosphere. Mystic clean vocals in the background and smooth growls harmonize in a perfect way. The keyboard solo sounding like a Hammond organ fits well and adds another degree of diversity to the track. “Forgotten sunrise” starts with a slow drum introduction and gets in with a slow and catchy guitar riff. The song is filled with atmospheric breaks and has strong gothic touch. Moog as well as flutes and keyboards underline a dark folk atmosphere. The short and sweet guitar solo in here is probably the most beautiful one on the record. “To father’s cabin” is dominated by the keyboards that create an atmosphere that would also fit to the score of a horror flick. The vocals are spoken this time and quite eerie and weird, sometimes whispered, sometimes hypnotically like an unholy spell. Sure thing is that I never heard something like this before. The final “Magic and mayhem” isn’t less surprising and plugs in some electronically elements. Gothic Metal goes psychedelic rock and techno but in a very consistent and progressive way. Once again, this is something I have never heard elsewhere and this experiment is probably the most outstanding one and a perfect surprise to close the album. Now, I have told you about every single song on the record which I would not often do, but the reason is simple in here. The tracks are all different from each other and still have a clear guiding line that unites them. By the way, most of them are all masterpieces and the only reason this album gets one point less than the top rating is that nothing is perfect.

In the end, this album feels coherent by its dark and majestic folk atmosphere, everything else is pretty much diversified and surprising. Every song has something unique and great but I must point out “The castaway”, “To father’s cabin” and “Magic and mayhem” that are worth one hundred percent and grow more and more on you each time you listen to them. It hasn’t been a long time ago since I discovered this record but I already consider it as a masterpiece and big classic of the entire metal scene and that’s why I don’t exaggerate when I give such a high rating. This album is visionary, courageous and highly progressive. Anybody that likes atmospheric and varied music in general must check this album out. It should be considered as a milestone no matter if you come from the doom, death, progressive, power or gothic genre. I never heard a band that reached such a high degree of intensity, diversity and professionalism with their second record already, maybe with the exception of “The Vision Bleak” and “The Old Dead Tree” that you might also check out if you like the kind of music you are experiencing here. I can only congratulate and continue to let this record spin once again and in the end over and over again.

From what I can tell, in the past 15 or so years, Amorphis has become some sort of Nuclear Blast-funded experiment into just how far away from metallic qualities or, you know, heaviness a band that’ll still find itself in any record shop’s metal section can go. I’ve gathered that they’re pretty successful, too; nothing on a Hanoi Rocks scale as far as Finnish bands go - but plenty of international tours and acclaimed albums. Tales From the Thousand Lakes is the first full-length in this new style; a bit more progressive, more obviously melodic and it’s catchy, too. But also as a sort of “transitional” album you’ll get a bit more of their old style thrown in: heavier riffs, with better harsh vocals than the dread-locked fellow and altogether it’s a bit more convincing as a metal album.

Still, I begin to think that Amorphis be much better off if they dropped the whole metal sound and went ahead as a prog rock band. From what I gleam they did such a thing in the late 90s, but it didn’t turn out too popular with the fans… oh well, never mind. Maybe they went back to prog later on? I’m no expert, really, nor do I want to be. It’s one of the more unique “death metal band has personality crisis” albums I’ve heard what with its pretentious, vaguely folky, slow melodic death metal. Most of the album’s death metal remnants are played out through generic token-Eastern sounding moments (not counting the lead guitar, which sounds like Ritchie Blackmore after several handfuls of sleeping pills). Thing is, while Tales From the Thousand Lakes must have been offering something new to an extent back in 1994, most of the riffs seem pasted from elsewhere. There’s the shallow Eastern sounding parts (because Finland shares its borders with China, right?), other death metal riffs watered down and played slower and even the odd Master of Puppets era Metallica homage. And hey presto, add some fluffy keyboards, tone down the aggression and you’ve got yourself a fresh sound. Just wonderful.

Since this is a transitional album you’ll have to suffer through the same shit you’d find on later Amorphis albums, expect this time it feels a little more out-of-place. It’s those Mike Patton-esque vocals that have my teeth grinding, mainly. I mean, I think Faith No More are a crime against humanity that should have been punishable in some grand, Nuremberg-esque trial - hanging all those responsible but this manages to be even more irritating. It’s probably something to do with the fact that the rest of the music isn’t nearly as bad as any Mike Patton project I’ve heard, and as such those vocals just stand out that little bit more. Honestly, though, if you ever needed an album to warm someone to the idea of harsh vocals, this might be a good one; after all that nasal whining one can’t help but rejoice when those parts are over. The harsh vocals and heavy riffs are just there to provide token metalisms but after those vocals they seem golden. As it turns out contrast is key to Amorphis’s success.

Still, at times, Tales From the Thousand Lakes despite its annoying and overbearing traits is as it least pretty memorable in the songwriting stakes. Even if for me, it’s for all the wrong reasons - and I will take that into account in my rating - but I can’t really deny that some of the songs have a “Look mother, salmon and trees!” quality about them. Worth something, I must admit. Still, it’s far from being “my thing” but I’m sure if I were to explore more slow melodic death metal (forget what you heard there’s not much in the way of death/doom here, it’s just a little bit too jolly for that).

I can recommend this to fans of later Enslaved, Opeth and maybe Katatonia’s shite albums. All things considered, they’d probably have a great time. Those wanting something with a bit more bite to it, something to sink your teeth into… well, look elsewhere. I mean it’s not the worst, post-death metal “growing pains” album I’ve ever heard (Carcass’s Whitesnake albums, anyone?) but far from enjoyable. The mix is a peculiar one; unappealing ingredients coming together in a way that’s, well, not as bad as you might’ve imagined. Colour me impressed!

Something old, something new
Something borrowed, something blue...

The old Victorian wedding rhyme describes Tales from the Thousand Lakes better than you'd expect. There indeed is something old, new and borrowed on the album, and while it splits opinions much more than necessary, it still definitely is one of the ten best-known Finnish metal albums of the 90s. It also is one of the ovarall best albums from anywhere from the 90s, but reaching that conclusion requires both understanding and knowledge of the subject matter and origins of the songs, and setting the rules of the competition in a slightly skewed way.

Tales from the Thousand Lakes was truly original -or new, as mentioned in the rhyme- at the time it was released. And it wasn't original only for the world around, it was a completely new thing for the band itself, as well. The transition from their excellent Karelian Isthmus era death metal to this new death/doom hybrid was already a rather innovative thing on the band's own part, and while it perhaps wasn't really that much ahead of its times in that respect, the fact that they blended in a hefty dose of folkish tunes tips the scales, and there's no avoiding the fact that the album was revolutionary in its own way. The final ingredient, the adding of many facets of 70s prog rock into the music, especially in in the keyboard work, turned Tales from the Thousand Lakes into something new and truly original.

The odd thing about anything successfully progressive is the way it turns from progressive and innovative to everyday business and nothing special in people's minds within a decade or two. It's natural, of course, since anything useful and usable the progressive and avant-garde bands manage to come up with will be copied by others, and will turn from rare caviar to a can of tuna that most people take for granted. For every progressive idea that gets approved by the mainstream, there are a thousand acts that will discover nothing that turns into a musical staple food for the majority. And the folk/death/doom blend from Tales from the Thousand Lakes is one of those staples nowadays. Obviously, it does not sound that progressive any more, but that's because its progression was no of the "funky time signature blended with wanking 'til it bleeds" kind, but of more subtle and innovative kind.

Of course, the "folk" part in the pile is not merry fiddling, mead drinking or a stupid accordeon, either, but almost hidden melodies with hints of a certain kind of Finnish folklore, the poetic and epic qualities of Kalevala, and that something the kinds of Burzum have unsuccessfully tried to create when composing their silly ambient works. That part of the music is, by default, dependent on the way the listener experiences and interprets it on a personal level, and also tied to the audience's cultural background; in finding the true spirit of Tales from the Thousand Lakes, being a Finn, knowing the kind of folk tunes included on the album and the works of Jean Sibelius, and generally just knowing the stories Amorphis took from the Kalevala, is definitely not a hindrance. Deep within, this is not an easy album to understand, even if the superficial, purely technical and musical levels seem easy to follow.

While the concept and songwriting on Tales from the Thousand Lakes is new, many aspects of the album are less than revolutionary -or old, as in the rhyme- and the teeth of time have not exactly been too kind to it.

The part that gets mentioned almost too often is the production. It reeks of the old-fashioned and the unpolished, and not in a good way. It already sounded old-fashioned when the album was released, and while the injections of 70s prog rock are easy to understand on the musical level, using an aged and vacuum-tube-analogue sounding production certainly downplays the metal part of the mixture a bit. The target has probably been an atmosphere that has a bit of the feel of an ancient dusty tome, perhaps a snapshot of an old-fashioned black-and-white documentary movies, and a painted natural scenery, but unfortunately, the result is less than perfect, and has grown truly old quicker than would have been necessary. The sound is flat, for the lack of a better word, coarse and occasionally powerless, and gives too much space for the proggy parts, at the cost of the metal's bulk. There is fidelity, with every single instrument completely audible throughout, but it comes at a cost.

The worst offenders on the album are the keyboard sounds, varying from artificial sounding Hammond, through early 80s pop synth and a crappy synth flute, to something not-to-be-named. They take the album back in time a whole decade, and a more careful process in the choosing of the sounds for the keyboards would have made a great difference. Not much better are the high tenor clean parts performed by Ville Tuomi, a necessary attachment to the band until the later arrival of Tomi Joutsen, the incredible jack-of-all-trades. Tuomi's voice is instantly recognizable, but it also has a character that doesn't suit the whole quite as well as Joutsen's later interpretations of the same songs. His surprisingly powerful and soaring parts have been mixed into the songs in a peculiar way, and seem to be detached from the rest of the soundscape, as if they were just an afterthought, and not a part of the original plan.

Of course, it's not very far fetched to ask if the post-Karelian Isthmus Amorphis ever really intended to be purely metal. Considering the developments that took place after this album, and especially starting with Tuonela, somehow betray a band that was mildly fed up with the confines of the genre, and definitely expanded to the direction of rock. So, what if Tales from the Thousand Lakes is metal because metal is the medium they were used to, and provided a suitable platform and tool set to convey the ideas they had and wanted to express? This is perhaps far-fetched and silly in the case of this particular album, of course, but if you spend an hour analyzing the complete career of the band, it's difficult to avoid the possibility that, post-Privilege of Evil, they never paid too much attention to any intentional metal purity, but rather played it because it served the songs, and provided the things they needed to make their music; if metalness got in the way of their compositions, they were willing to ditch the metal and compose on with other means.

In any case, the keyboard melodies and certain guitar parts are obviously influenced by the progressive rock of earlier decades. Someone with more knowledge of that era might perhaps tell if actual recycling takes place; it seems unlikely, though, since the 70s prog rockers had little in the way of metal to use as a context, and fitting a melody that reeks of unwashed hippies needs plenty of pummeling before it fits a fundamentally metal song.

There's plenty of stuff copied and emulated -or borrowed, in the context of our stupid rhyme- on the album.

The atmosphere and emotions of Kalevala were defined by a few famous Finnish artists in the late 19th century. Jean Sibelius composed his Karelia Suite, a set of orchestral pieces worth a metalhead's time, and defined something essential, epic, and perhaps heroically fairytalesque in his music. Akseli Gallen-Kallela painted his most famous Kalevala themed works, and if a pure silent picture can be found in a metal song's sonic form, Tales from the Thousand Lakes has a bit of Aino drowning herself, a dash of the heroes in a boat defending the fabled Sampo against the evil woman from the far North, and a bearded smith forging his bride of silver... all incidentally turned into individual song themes later in the band's career, and all famous poems in the national epic. That elusive something is in the mood and atmosphere of the album, and it's perhaps the most inherently Finnish aspect of this piece of art, a condensed essence of something national, an almost spiritual thing. If you've never smelled the fresh leaves of a birch in a smoke sauna next to a chilly lake in the silence and twilight of a midsummer night, you probably lack something necessary to appreciate all the aspects of the atmosphere.

Some of the borrowed things are more straightforward and obvious, of course. "Magic and Mayhem", the song that has been one of the band's most successful national calling cards during the first half of their career, starts with a guitar melody that essentially recreates an old folk tune, "Tein minä pillin pajupuusta", a song about a humble shepherd boy who fashions a crude flute out of a branch he cuts from a willow. The other loans from the national chest of tunes are not quite as obvious, but they are there.

So what is the blue part on the album? Besides the cover art?

Nothing, really; no blues here. Unless you count the final emotion as a "blue" feeling. The Finnish depressive mentality, the main reason for the massive numbers of suicides and alcoholism in the country, finds a new expression in these songs. The melancholy, distictly different from the Slavic kind, is there. There's the feeling of the autumn eventually crushing the hope of summer, the falling leaves, the eternal twilight of the winters, and the cold of the north, all blended into the stories of great deeds, permeating through the whole album. It would perhaps be better described as a "blue and white" emotion, because Tales from the Thousand Lakes wears the national colours proudly. If someone says that the album is one of the best Finnish metal albums ever, the part to be stressed in the analysis is the word "Finnish". The nationalistic character of the music shares some of the passive-aggressive mentality of the nation, probably unintentionally. It still might make the album a bit more inaccessible to foreigners, even if the metal crowd everywhere is probably much more receptive to this part of the emotional spectrum than the listeners of other forms of music. The same depression has lately surfaced in the works of Viikate, and the early works of the now popular Kotiteollisuus were essentially fueled with it; both bands are unfortunately even less accessible to outsiders, because they use the Finnish language.

Tales from the Thousand Lakes is a mighty fine album, even if it suffers from premature aging and some questionable choices that amount to mere details in the big picture. However, when listening to it for the first time, especially if you're young and a foreigner, you should remember that it's not as accessible as it at first claims to be. There are many more layers under the surface, and understanding them is a huge task; most will never find their way to the innermost chambers, because those vistas spring from the depths of ancient tales that shaped a nation, evade analysis like reflections of the opposite shore on the surface of a forest lake, and work their magic in the soul. It's still worth a try, even if it might take years to accomplish. There's guaranteed to be enough food for the soul underneath the skin.

This is my first review for Metal-Archives. The reason I chose this album to be the first one being reviewed is that this was the album that made me understand gutural vocals, what they are, why they exist and what they mean.

If you follow them since the beginning, something to notice immediately is about the style. They used to be more like "old school death metal", then turned a bit melodic, then turned to doom metal in this release. They were really good as a death metal band, and usually when a band is considered good, and they change their style, it turns out bad. But that's not what we have here. The album is creative, melodic, heavy, and beautiful. The atmosphere is just like the artwork (which is amazingly beautiful) suggests: dark, gloomy, and Scandinavian.

The album starts with an intro piece on piano, very touching and beautiful. And soon you're into a tide of good/heavy/melodic riffs and a low pitched growl. Into Hiding is the perfect song to summarize the whole album. We have clean vocals here also, interacting with the gutural voices. The next song, The Castaway is clearly influenced by local melodies and Pink Floyd. Yes, Pink Floyd. Check it out yourself at the mark of 4 minutes. First Doom shows some influence from the past with faster riffs than the rest of the album, and lots of double bass.

The next song is a masterpiece. Best song of the album in my opinion, and the first song I heard by them. Magic melody and creative riffs, which is more like a solo. The clean vocals strike again with grace and beauty. The main solo is played by a keyboard then it is followed by the essence of the riff, which, as I said, is more like a solo, and if you play guitar, you should try to learn this piece, soon you'll realize this isn't easy at all!

Drowned Maid's got the best groove of the album. and the best chorus as well. Lots of riffs keeps looping during the song for like 20 times, but turns out this is the magic of the song, every time the next riff comes, you feel like you're hipnotized by the melody.

The rest of the album keeps showing more progressive influences and local melodies. The use of keyboard solos/arranges are very creative and deserves to be noticed properly. Forgotten Sunrise has a nice time signature which will make you look to your guitar and say: "I want to put up something like this for one song of mine". Same occurs when you listen to the riff at 2:50. Very heavy and catchy, maybe the heaviest riff in the album. Followed by a solo that will surely crawl your skin. To Father's Cabin starts with a progressive wave, then clean vocals declaimed like a poetry are followed by a nice piece of improvisation and good riffs, like the one at 2:32. No vocals until the end of the song: magic! Which is by the way a part of the name of the last song. Magic & Mayhem. Soon enough at :20, you'll see a beautiful bridge which leads you to a festival of riffs, until, finally the song starts. It's a great song filled with finnish influences also. Some versions have the weird and funny cover Light My Fire (The Doors). It's heavy and awkward. If you haven't had yet, the opportunity to listen to that, you might wanna. Funny stuff.

Overall, the album deserves the rate I gave to it. Not only because is an important album for me, which I consider as a milestone, but this is a true masterpiece that should last forever as one of the best doom metal albums.

Though their recent offerings have slacked off in the progression department, content with simply cannibalizing the range of their previous works, there was a time in which every step Amorphis made was extremely fresh. From the primitive death/doom of their debut Karelian Isthmus to their glazed hippie folk rock on Am Universum, they continued to bring something new to the table. After that, well, they struck a plateau, acquired a new vocalist, and now continue to rehash (and to be fair, refine) a few of their earlier ideas. Tales from the Thousand Lakes is not my favorite Amorphis record, I would have to bestow that honor upon the successor Elegy, for it's wild and imaginative mesh of 70s prog, folk rock and eternally memorable melodic death metal. But this album is where the levee broke. The band's name was no longer a whisper on the tongues of a few underground death heads, but a roar throughout Europe and beyond.

The real draw here is the increased atmosphere that the band initiatied through the acquisition of Kasper Martenson, whose Moog and pianos fit fluidly with the bands gruff, bottom feeding atrocities. But he was not the only marked difference from the band's debut; the addition of folk-like, wandering melodies into the guitar elevated the entire experience, and many bands in the future would adopt a similar style and tone. This album would be the last before Pasi Koskinen joined the band, so the growls here are handled by guitarist Tomi Koivusaari, with some Ville Tuomi of Kyyria contributing some cleans. Add the band's lyrical themes, derived from the Kalevala (Finnish folklore collection), and the result of these shifts in direction were nothing less than spectacular. Tales from the Thousand Lakes still sounds amazing, 15 years later.

The "Thousand Lakes" itself is an excellent intro piece, Martenson combining a string of resonant piano strikes with some subtler notation, lush female choir synthesizers and electronic noise like running water begins to fill it out until it swells to a climax 2 minutes later, to inaugurate "Into Hiding", which arrives in sodden, melodic despair. The low end retains the death/doom mantras that dominated their previous album, but the folk feel to the melodies makes the track instantly recognizable, a hybrid of arabesque and Scandinavian composition. "The Castaway" opens with some of the best guitars on the album, immediate and glorious, to which the elfin ghosts of the cold forest traipse about uncontrollably. It was a year when thrash metal had all but closed the grazing grounds, and death metal felt soon to follow, and here comes Amorphis to help open the floodgates and re-invigorate the ailing metal scene. "First Doom" slowly churns itself into a gorgeous, glistening doom melody reminiscent of Paradise Lost's first two albums, one of the darker and more pensive tracks on the album. And following this, the album's most timeless track, "Black Winter Day", which got it's own EP release (most copies of this CD will have the EP material attached). A cycling, crushing track with excellent melodies provided through both the guitar and keyboard, against a swelling backdrop, and Tuomi making his best contribution to the record through his cutting clean vocals.

'This is how the lucky feel
How the blessed think
Like daybreak in spring
The sun on a spring morning'

"Drowned Maid" picks up the pace for a winding, churning foray into submerged terror, dense overarching melodies compete for your affection below the weight of Koivusaari's grunt, and then at about :55 they bust out that INCREDIBLE riff. Drowning never felt this lovely. "In the Beginning" has a great interplay between the growling and Tuomi, and some bustling synth work during the bridge that would foreshadow some of the better moments of the followup album. "Forgotten Sunrise" is an almost blues-like, elegaic exploration, with swaggering melodies accompanied by the Moog, and some pure, flowing old school death metal expression. "To Father's Cabin" has a dash of Metallica-inspired, slow thrashing before it turns into a curious jam. There is quality to be had here, but it's my least favorite on the record (probably the one reason this album is not a 10/10). "Magic and Mayhem" more than compensates with its blissful descent, the acoustics and organs burdened in sorrow and grace, then transforming into a groovy metal breakdown with some proggy synthesizer strikes.

The production standards here were immense for the day. It was by far one of the best death metal sounds to arrive in the 90s, and it HAD to be, because of the added layers of synth to the core composure, and the separate vocal styles. I would not change a damn thing here, it seems as impressive to me in 2009 as it ever did before, and I can still lose myself deep inside the tones. The lyrical matter is fantastic, the band's dedication to their own heritage never feeling cheap, and rather than just write gallivantin' melodies they most often explore the darker side to the fables, which is more suitable to their music. This is the last truly 'dark' Amorphis album, in fact, as Elegy would be a lot more enthusiastic (though not lacking in the metal department). Though a major progression over the previous album, this is hardly an 'experimental' album, the clarity of vision is evident as the one direction this band could travel in. And it gave them great, deserved success. That you can now pick this up with the added tracks of the Black Winter Day EP is a given. Tales from the Thousand Lakes is an essential metal album, for more than nostalgic reasons, with only one track lagging behind the rest.

Lowlights: realizing that no matter how inspired I ever might become, I could never produce something like this, even through divine intervention.

-autothrall
http://www.fromthedustreturned.com

I've been stalling on reviewing this album, because I really just did not want to listen to it again after the horrible first impression it made on me when I first heard it. This was the sophomore effort from resident "mommy do we HAVE to play metal?" Finnish flip-floppers Amorphis, the band who could never decide what they wanted to be and could never produce an album that was straight out quality all the way through, and you'll have to excuse me if I don't like it quite as much as some people seem to. It has grown on me quite a bit since my first couple of plays, but I still just don't think this band is all that great.

So, yeah, this album really doesn't want to be metal. It's got growls and heavy riffs, but those are like the last remains of flesh hanging off the bones of a human skeleton; this album is structurally almost purely wish-washy synth Pink Floyd rock all the way. It's got all the trappings of that sound, from the hypnotic, dreamlike synths to the oddly laid back sort of tempo that all of these songs resign themselves to. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but I just can't help but think that it could be done better. Something about this band's combination of sound just doesn't do it for me, that's the best way I can describe it. They write some solid songs, but it doesn't seem like they really have much conviction; if they aren't sure about where they want to go with this, how are we supposed to be?

I guess the main draw of this album is supposed to be the "wintry, frosty, lake-like atmosphere" that the band uses here to a great extent. And by that I mean, the atmosphere that draws comparisons to the algae on the bottom of the lake, or maybe the mist from a shower that collects on your mirror as you turn up the water...which I guess came from a pipe in the lake, if that helps this album's credibility. And I'm not just being a sarcastic asshole here, that's really what atmosphere this album evokes. It's something about that synth sound, really; that's what it is. This album is definitely the Tales of the Thousand Lakes (and before you email me telling me what the title really means, hold your horses - I already know), but what they don't tell you is just what part of the lake you're going to be taking journeys to. So take this as you will, because while I don't like it, I imagine some of you won't care as much about being musically whisked away to the base of the sewer pipe at the bottom of the lake.

There is a certain novelty value about this, obviously, but that only means that some songs have atrocious clean vocals that sound like something you'd hear out of a Latin radio station; or more like someone attempting to try out for one and failing. I am dead serious. He makes appearances on a couple of songs here, and I have to say I can't take off many points for it, because his role in the actual album is pretty small, but the annoyance remains. Pretty much all of these songs are pretty well written for what they are, even though I can't say I enjoy it that much. "Black Winter Day" is the only exception; a really lame song with a shitty keyboard melody that I cannot stand at all. Come on, are you really going to tell me with a straight face that you enjoy this song? A lot of people seem to like this song, which confused me at first until I remembered that most people have terrible taste. But the rest of the stuff on here is passable enough, in the context of...watered down Doom Death blandness with atmospheric keyboards and vocals that don't leave any impression on you.

This album is flighty, insincere and pretty boring most of the time, and I don't really get why anybody likes it. I can't say I really enjoy this album much at all, even in its best moments. At best, it's just inoffensive music to tap your feet to, but a lot of the time it bores me even in that regard. This isn't that horrible, but there are just so many other things you could be listening to besides this. There are better doom bands, better Death Metal bands, better mellow rock bands...just all around better bands. So if you are considering listening to this soggy sandwich on metal's proverbial lake surface...don't.

Depending on who you believe, Tales from the Thousand Lakes is either the point where Amorphis sold out, or where they produced one of the all time great melodic death metal albums. Truth is, neither are correct. Tales is a transitional album, a midway between the brilliant atmospheric doomy DM of The Karelian Isthmus, and the ambitious riff-tastic progressive masterpiece Elegy. Tales takes elements from both but compromises too much of their earlier style for a newer aesthetic not fully mastered.

To be honest, how this is cited by anyone as Amorphis' best is beyond me. The production is really subpar for the era, which is even more disappointing given that The Karelian Isthmus is a shining example of almost perfect production. Tomi Koivusaari's vocals are lacking in intensity and, without the cleans of Pasi Koskinen as a contrast, become fairly monotonous. The lyrics are embarassingly awful, although given the unintelligibility of the vocals, this is not the most critical flaw.

That honour belongs to the riffs, which are unoriginal and unmemorable, and even more so when compared to the preceding and subsequent albums. The Karelian Isthmus was chock-full of simple, slow, atmospheric and memorable riffs, and Elegy showed the emergence and mastery of a new style, blazing, melodic and catchy. Tales shows this latter style trying to emerge, but these riffs are same-ish, too often chuggy and when a good one finally does appear, it gets drenched by goofy sounded keys (Black Winter Day being a perfect example). There are some decent leads here and there, but they lose impact when the rhythm guitars are so often going chug-chug-chug underneath.

As for being a landmark of melodic death, this isn't anything which hadn't been done better by Eucharist and Sentenced. Only with the realisation of Elegy did Amorphis succeed in contributing something significant in this respect.

Tales From the Thousand Lakes is Amorphis’ 1994 second full length release, and is widely considered a definitive album of the melodic death metal scene. There is no denying that this is a wildly ambitious album, and whether or not you agree with the hype surrounding it, its legacy is written in stone.

Instead of sticking to the already original formula of their debut, The Karelian Isthmus, Amorphis go further with their sound to create even more captivating and memorable music. This time around, Amorphis increase the melodic side of the compositions, without compromising their death metal roots. After the entrancing piano intro, Into Hiding kicks things off with one of the many outstanding, slow paced, doom riffs you will find on the album. We also hear something brand new to Amorphis’ sound in this song, and this is clean vocals. This aspect of the album is controversial. Many people say that the clean singing is amateur and fails to fit with the production, while others (myself included) feel that they heighten the ominous mood that this record creates. Like them or not, clean vocals would go on to appear in every Amorphis release after this point. With that said, the vast majority of the vocals here are excellent throaty growls; essentially identical to the debut album, with a rough production to accompany them.

Although synth was used mildly on The Karelian Isthmus, keyboards play a large part of the overall sound on this album. Don’t let this scare you away. They are not used like Children of Bodom use keyboards, but instead used to push the dark atmosphere even further. Just listen to the first ten seconds of Black Winter Day and you should understand my point. As with all Amorphis albums though, it’s the guitar that makes me fall so deeply in love with the songs. Tales contains many of Amorphis’ finest riffs; whether it’s the doomy Into Hiding, the epic Castaway, or the melodious Drowned Maid, the song writing would go on to influence countless bands ins the melodic death metal scene.

As I said earlier, this is a remarkably ambitious album for a band such as Amorphis to produce. Using extensive keyboards, clean vocals, and lyrics based entirely on the Finnish national epic, Kalevala, was certainly not common practice among the majority of death metal bands in the early ‘90s. The song writing itself crossed boundaries into strange, unexplored paths. For example, the jazzy interlude in The Castaway is certainly something that wasn’t practical at this time.

I have no problem with admitting that when I first gave this album a listen, I didn’t appreciate it the way I do now. It wasn’t until I took it on walks during black winter days until I uncovered the true beauty hidden beneath these ten mournful, yet glorious tunes. I believe that the appeal to this album is not simply in the songs themselves, but rather in the atmosphere the music so effortlessly conveys. Although the songs on Tales From the Thousand Lakes may not necessarily be the finest Amorphis have ever written, the gloomy atmosphere presented is something that can never be recreated. I honestly cannot recommend this album any higher. I ask that you give it a chance, and try not to judge it on the first listen. I only hope it will grow on you in the same way it did for me.

Sometimes when I hear an album it takes me into another realm or another space. For example, I could have my headphones on and it could be 97 degrees outside and humid and what I'm listening to makes me feel like I'm minutes away from the arctic circle with the north winds smacking me in the face. An album that makes me feel like I am in the place where the songwriter has intended me to be. An album doesn't have to do this to be a good album but if it does, it's special.

"Tales from the Thousand Lakes" isn't just stereotypical death metal. Amorphis created a timeless masterpiece with this work. The culmination of atmospheric keyboards, gutteral vocals, ripping but melodic guitar work and deadly precise drumming make this an instant classic. It's hard to believe that this came out 15 years ago. This one was way far advanced for it's time. By far, this has to be the best overall metal album that I've heard come out of Finland.

As far as this albums production, it's a bit rough. I don't think this album would be as good as it is with anything different. Keep in mind, I haven't heard the re-release so I'm speaking of the way the original master sounds. It's not overly raw but you can still here some crackling. For 1993 I would say it's very mid grade. Not 80's primitive sounding but not modern.

Everything stands out on this album perfectly. The guitars are what shines the most. Very melodic and still brutal. The doom-laden pace of the guitar work carries the message of what they are trying to send very well. You can hear every note, every chord perfectly. The notes cut through like glacial winds in January. No soloing though. First time I heard this album, I didn't even notice. It wasn't one of those instances where I was like, "Hey where's the damn solo?" It's that good.

Amorphis incorporate much more keyboard in this album compared to it's predecessor, "The Karelian Isthmus". It's not a virtuoso keyboard style but it still fits harmoniously well with the rest of the composition. The keyboards on "Black Winter Day", the albums first and only single, are dominating in a good way. The song opens with keyboards and is peppered with measures of keyboards throughout. Another good keyboard friendly track is "To Fathers Cabin".

Vocally, Tomi Koivusaari is very minimal. If you read the lyrics you'd understand. There is no set pattern on any song. It seems as if Tomi just comes in randomly with his vocals when it felt right for him. Very nontraditional death metal vocal style for it's time. The gutteral approach is also very nontraditional with the music style it accompanies, especially with keyboards, but again it works phenomenally.

If you were introduced to Amorphis any album after this and haven't heard this yet, I'd say give it a shot. You'll be amazed at how different they are now compared to where they started. This is cutting edge metal, even for today. Every single song is good. This is a very mature album, and it may sound cliché, but this is a timeless masterpiece.

"Tales From The Thousand Lakes" is the second album from Amorphis, and their last album that had a lot more death growls than clean vocals. And in my opinion "Tales From The Thousand Lakes" is the best album Amorphis has ever made, and one of my all time favorite albums.

Music on this album is doomy death metal, with a lot of folkish influences on guitar and keyboard melodies, and there is a little bit progressive elements showing on song structures. Actually the music style has some similarities to Paradise Lost's "Gothic" album, but this one is a lot more folkish, and maybe a bit more melodic. Vocals are still mostly death grunts, but couple of the songs does have a small amount of clean vocals, like "Black Winter Day" and "Into Hiding". All the lyrics are from the book Kalevala, which is the national epic of Finland. And it is a nice change from the more usual metal lyrics, at least in my opinion.

In my opinion Esa Holopainen does his best work on this album. He's guitar playing on this albums is simply amazing, lots of good guitar melodies and some great solos. Also Kasper Mårtenson's keyboard playing is great, sadly this is only Amorphis album with him. Rest of the band does a good job as well, but none of the other members does anything groundbreaking.

Production is far away from a perfect production, but in my opinion it fits to the mood of this album perfectly. Although when I first heard this album, the production sounded a little bit annoying, but after few listens I got used to it. Also every instrument can be heard easily so it isn't that big of a problem.

Anyway "Tales From The Thousand Lakes" is a great album. There really isn't any big faults, only a few bad riffs. I recommend this to anyone who likes death metal or doom metal, there isn't many doomdeath albums that are as good as this.

Highlights: All the songs are great, but best songs in my opinion are "Into Hiding", "Black Winter Day", "Into Hiding" and "Forgotten Sunrise"

Tales From The Thousand Lakes is regarded by many the highlight of Amorphis' career and I couldn't agree more. Personally I started listening the band from albums such as Elegy and Tuonela and it wasn't until few years ago that I first time heard Tales. Now as we have this fact here you can't tell me that I love this album because it brings memories, or anything like that. It just happens to be a nearly perfect album that dropped me from my chair when I realized that for years I had been listening to metal and had not heard a masterpice like this!

What we have here is doomy death metal spiced with folk melodies, keyboards and overall a very epic feeling. The songs are mostly quite slow or mid-tempo and not aggressive in the way most death metal is, instead there's all the time an atmospheric, almost dreamy feeling that makes your thoughts fly.

The production here is a thing that divides opinions. For some people the overall sound is too muffled, and sure if you're used to what newer Amorphis albums sound like, this sounds different. However, personally I think that the raw production gives even more feeling to the music. I mean the epic feeling. The guitars are heavy and low, the drums pound like hammers, and especially the vocals are awesome - Tomi Koivusaari's very low grunts on this album are probably the best death metal vocals I have heard. Add the wisely used keyboards and a pounding bass, and you have here everything needed.

If there's something negative among this brilliance, the occasional clean vocals aren't so great. Ville Tuomi's nasal voice doesn't really fit into the dark and low soundscape but you'll get used to it, and luckily there are clean vocals only in few tracks.

The compositions are great and there aren't any filler tracks. Ok, some songs are even more brilliant than others but there's not a single boring moment. In my opinion the highlights include at least "Into Hiding", "The Castaway" and "In The Beginning". The lyrics, as you may already know, are taken from the Finnish national epic "Kalevala" and translated to English. If you know these myths already, it helps to understand the lyrics but even if you dont' they're interesting and fit well together with the music.

A little trivia: some years ago in some music magazine there was a poll about which album could be the "Finnish national metal album" and this was ranked high, first or second place (the other succesful one being the debut of Stone.)

This really is a one of a kind album and I recommend anyone to check it out, unless you're a death metal hater who can't stand growling vocals at all. For anyone else into metal it's an essential, a true classic.

Surprisingly, this Amorphis was the one I bought after that crappy one Far From The Sun. I enjoyed Far From The Sun a little, but when I heard this for the first time, Amorphis played out some great tunes, and it made me wonder why they still don't write music like this. Trying to keep up with the times, or something, I suppose.


Many of the Finnish band's songs are remeniscient of Middle Eastern/Folk melodies, and this album is very atmospheric, which sets it apart greatly from many of the metal albums of its time. The music is still considerably heavy, but it engulfs you when you listen to it. Vocals are both growling and clean, the growling doesn't intrude too much, and this was before I ever even heard of or enjoyed growling vocals. The double guitar melodies are excellent, they melt together into one another like a caramel-nougat filling, for lack of a better metaphor. The guitarists are by no means virtuosos, so there's no badass shredding or solos, but they knew what they were doing when they put the music together. Excellent rhythm. The bass and drums are intact too. The drums are by no means fantastic, but they really go together with the other instruments. The bass, who is typically the unsung hero in many a metal song, really sets off the rhythm here, and I often like to hear that when I listen to Tales.


The only things I have to complain about are the lyrics, based on The Kalevala. The Kalevala is supposed to be a great Finnish epic, similar to Lord of The Rings and whatever, but a lot of the meaning of the original poem is lost in translation. It goes good with the music, and you can get somewhat of a feel of the story they are trying to tell, but it doesn't really work lyrically.


Black Winter Day is clearly the best one on this album. This song is a classic melodical black/ doom/ metal one, and it calls for some slow, steady headbanging. The riffs and keyboard meld together and create a great metal epic. The lyrics, as mentioned, are sub-par, but the music more than makes up for it.


Into Hiding follows suit, but it isn't as great. The beginning of the song, and the melody is great because it picks up and throws you through the rest of the song. The bass obviously helps this one out too. I still don't really like the lyrics in this one (or any of the songs on the album for that matter). Again, the awesome melody and rhythm picks up the slack for the poetry.


Drowned Maid is the 3rd best song on the album, in my opinion. It starts off with a fast melody, and the lyrics include "flesh" and "blood", so yeah... it's pretty awesome.


Damage Report (Synopsis):
Tales From The Thousand Lakes is among Amorphis' best Doom Metal albums, but isn't THE best. It keeps the band's traditional heavy yet elegant, ambient melodies and rhythms going, but it definately is lacking something lyrically... let's say, a coherent story. It would be stupid to base your opinion on the album solely on the lyrics however, because that's not what music is about, but lyrics should definately be considered when they're part of a song.

While the Holy Trinity between In Flames, Dark Tranquillity, and At The Gates was forming over in Sweden, Amorphis had already reached perfection with -Tales From The Thousand Lakes- in Finland.

Vocalist/guitarist Tomi Koivusaari does the growls/cookie monster vocals, which I think mix very well with the music. Amorphis also happened to hire Ville Tuomi to perform clean vocals for a sense of variety and so that Tomi's doesn’t get dull. In any case, his vocals are very doom-like; lazy, light growls straight dug from the throat rather than the powerful deathlike one from their debut. My theory behind the appeal that this album holds to so many people is the atmosphere it creates when you let it fully absorb you. The mood and vibe flowing through each song gives a stronger significance to them. I do find the production to be rusty on some tracks more than others, but everything one wants to hear is mostly reached (It’s their second album, c’mon).

The monster vocals are easy to take in, but the clean singing at first will appear shallow, which is probably the reason why they hired Pasi to handle them on later records. Songs like "Into Hiding" and "Black Winter Day" will have memorable passages that will automatically hook you with catchy riffs and keyboard parts (both the backbone of the album). Esa’s riffs and solos are seriously stand out to perfection, while Tomi settles the rhythm try and true. Jan’s drumming capabilities can’t go without saying they aren’t brutal, but they are well paced, solidly timed, and dusty as one would expect. Olli-Pekka’s bass lines are heard clearly when the rest of the instruments calm down, leaving him to never exceed or show any sign of intricacy exceeding what’s already being played by the riffs.

While the production isn’t near reaching the best quality of 1994, Tales… doesn’t let up with what is put on it. All the tracks seem to have some degree of catchiness while many of them are extremely memorable due mainly to Esa’s riffs and the structure of the song. Another thing that one shouldn’t worry about is the length. While the album almost reaches 38 minutes on the original, the re-release has a few more worthwhile tracks and the songs are so deep that one will dive into them, creating the “lasting” effect. Any (Melodic) Death fan that digs varied songs, both heavy and catchy, should not pass this up. Go now, the Karelian is waiting!

After hearing the gruesome lyrics of earlier Amorphis releases like, "Privilege of Evil," I was expecting more of the same. Tales From the Thousand Lakes follows basically the same path but with toned down lyrics, and more instrumental and talented tracks that are instant classics.

This album delivers heavy guitar tunes and very constant steady drumming work. Following the paths of Death/Black/Viking metal and mixing in tunes of melodic metal, and not forgetting about the harsh deep vocals this album is a must have. I have personally rated each track out of 10 (10 being best).

This first song, "Thousand Lakes," is an into track that delivers peaceful piano playing and an opera chorus that sets your mind up in an ocean filled world full of legends and mysteries. This tacks is short and completely done with keyboards, an all instrumental sound.

After a gloomy set up intro track the album jumps directly into, "Into Hiding," a quickly paced track with great heavy guitar beats that guide the song into solo riffs that jump into the song hear and there. It talks about a man that is running away from bad deeds and escapes as an eagle to hide for the rest of his life. This track is one of my personal favourites.

The next track, "The Castaway," starts out with a catchy tune likely played by one guitar, which is followed by heavier guitars that try to follow the same tune. I believe that this section of the song could have been done better because it does not follow the first part of the song very well. This track never seems to developed much just keeps moving along playing the same tune until about 1:35 in the song when the heavy riffs come in with a steady beat, and the light guitars carry on with the starting tune. This track talks about the man who is an eagle and is soaring across the ocean. Overall this is a very well composed track but could have been played a little better, the track also carries on a bit long.

The following track, "First Doom," is not much better. It starts out heavy with good drums and a slow beat but slows down a little much, still good riffs keeps the track from becoming lame. The track finally speeds up for a while. The lyrics I can only guess what they are talking about; I may be wrong but I think that it mentions the man asking the queen of North for forgiveness... come up with your own idea if you want.

The next track is the classic of all Death/Black Metal. "Black Winter Day," is a true masterpiece that combines everything you could ever want in a Metal song. Catchy tunes such as the beginning keyboard solo and then the heavy guitars bursting in and the perfect death metal growl makes for a perfect song. Later on in the song some Guitar solo's come, meanwhile the drumming is perfectly timed and follows the song perfectly. Overall this is a picture perfect track (Amorphis's best). The track never gets boring and stays good until the end. The vocals to this song are yet again confusing, but what I get out of them is that the same man is feeling guilty of his crimes when he really shouldn’t be.

The following track, "Drowned Maid," is nearly as good as, Black Winter Day. Combining a good heavy tune with melodic guitars guiding the entire song. Three different tunes all really good come into place during the song, fitting the mood for the lyrics, which are played during each different section of the song. This track talks about the death of a maid and a hen where their blood and flesh is poured into the ocean.

Track # 7, "In the Beginning," combines all components of the tracks above but throwing in a normal man’s voice along with the growling voice. I am not sure if the two voices fit well together but it is something different. I have no clue what this song is talking about.

The next song, "Forgotten Sunrise," is an interesting song that starts out with a beat played by heavy guitars that follows a skilled solo which directs the track until about 2:40 in the song, when the heavy base and lead guitars carry on a very good sounding tune very different from the beginning of the song. Occasionally the two tunes mix creating yet another good melody. This track I believe talks about the man who was mentioned in earlier tracks; in this song it mentions how the corruptions of modern times have plagued the man turning him evil.

“To Fathers Cabin,” is a very different track that almost sounds out of place on this album; but the song itself is very well done. Starting out with a clean flowing sound using an extremely catchy tune, this track looses some of its glory in the middle section which starts at about 40 seconds into the track. This section is the vocals, which I think, are poorly done not matching the tunes much and the voice is lame and boring. After another minute of mindless playing the track really gets back on track at 2:05 in which the song directs a great solo and a well flowing beat that slowly ends the masterpiece of a track. The Lyrics are a bit confusing I am not really sure if they have much of a point other then talking about a powerful old man.

The 10th track, “Magic and Mayhem,” starts out with a slow beat that has a graceful and sad sound to it and is not entirely entertaining. At 1:00 the track changes direction very quickly, a grind/gritty sound is produced portraying a more sinister type theme. The lyrics I think are talking about an evil man who is rich and powerful with slaves, and treats people poorly.

The following track, “Folk of the North,” is another instrumental track using a keyboard and drums and a base guitar. Other guitars join in later, which make this song feel magical and full of mystery.

Track number 12, “Moon and Sun,” is a slowly paced song that has a dark sound to it, somewhat like earlier Amorphis albums. This track is quite similar to earlier tracks but with a different beat. Although the tune is not very exciting or has any catchy tunes this track is a good solid track to have on the album. The track talks about darkness falling over the land and battle commencing.

The second part to the, “Moon and Sun,” “Moon and Sun Part II: North’s Son,” is a more energetic sequel that is a good ending track for this album. Combing catchy tunes with good steady beats that are constantly changing, and building up and then going back to slow beats, this track talks about the ending of all that was talked about in the lyrics of earlier tracks.

The last song, “Light my Fire,” is just a remake of the original by, “The doors.” Amorphis do an excellent job of playing the song with a much heavy tone and Death metal lyrics. This track has catchy tunes and good guitar riffs.

So all in all Amorphis’s classic masterpiece, “Tales from the Thousand Lakes,” is an exceptional album with a perfect death metal type sound but not entirely death metal like lyrics. I would class this album as Death/Viking metal with a hint of folk. After listening to this album you will feel like you had been taken on a journey and met many new people, seen extraordinary events take place, and mysteries without answers spring up

Definitely buy this album I highly recommend it, the album is much heavier and darker then modern Amorphis and not as dark and deathlike as past Amorphis. I hope I have helped you decide if this Album is worth having because it definitely is.

Boomstick