Nightwish 'Oceanborn' review
Release date: 1997
Label(s): Spinefarm
Duration: 53:11
Details
- Stargazers
- Gethsemane
- Devil & the Deep Dark Ocean
- Sacrament of Wilderness
- Passion and the Opera
- Swanheart
- Moondance
- The Riddler
- The Pharaoh Sails To Orion
- Walking in the Air
- Sleeping Sun
Review
Considered by Tuomas Holopainen to be Nightwish's first real album, Oceanborn is a classic example of symphonic power metal at its finest. Which is good.
The album spends its time shifting effortlessly between the bombastic ("Stargazers", "Sacrament of Wilderness") and the balladic ("Swanheart", "Walking in the Air") while maintaining enough diversity to entertain and amaze throughout. One of the first impressions a listener gets is the major improvement in leading lady Tarja Turunen's vocals since their first album, most apparent in the opeatic interludes of "Passion and the Opera" and the calm choruses of "Gethsemane". Her versatility is one of the main highlights of the album, but quite frankly the entire band is in top form for what is as a whole quite a technically difficult piece.
The production on the album isn't impressive, but it gets the job done without ever being abrasive. It doesn't come close to matching the sounds of later albums, but it is a notable improvement over 'Angels Fall First'.
Oceanborn only features a few low points, one being "Devil & the Deep Dark Ocean", in which guest vocalist Tapio Wilska provides a performance that is a little too rough over a song that isn't that great. He makes up for it with a much better performance in a later track, "The Pharaoh Sails To Orion".
The album is very coherent, very consistent in quality, and featuring several of Nightwish's best songs- great examples being closing ballads Walking In The Air and Sleeping Sun. There's little to say about it other than an affirmation of its quality, and its status as a real winner in the genre.
8/10