Nightwish was formed in 1996 by lead songwriter and keyboardist Tuomas Holopainen, guitarist Emppu Vuorinen, and former lead singer Tarja Turunen. From their first album Angels Fall First onward Nightwish gradually grew to become one of the most successful Finnish bands ever. The first era of Nightwish ended with an open letter in which the band fired their formidable frontwoman Tarja Turunen. At the time is was difficult to imagine Nightwish without her. But while her replacement Anett Olzon never completely filled Tarja's shoes, the music writing from Tuomas Holopainen grew exponentially in quality to create magnificent epic symphonic metal music. In 2012, the band split up with the singer before they announced Floor Jansen as new vocalist. The live DVD and CD Showtime, Storytime was the first Nightwish production to feature Floor on vocals. I remember being mesmerized by her performance. While she can be operatic, she can also be a very powerful metal singer. the combination is bombastic. Additionally she has amazing stage presence, making her the perfect choice for such a huge band. The first studio album with Floor 2015's Endless Forms Most Beautiful is (was?) my favorite Nightwish album. So I've been looking forward to this follow-up five years later.
HUMAN. :II: NATURE. released on April 10, 2020 through Nuclear Blast is the band's first double album with 81 minutes of music. The first disc features 9 songs in 50 min. Disc 2 contains the 30-min long "All the Works of Nature Which Adorn the World" broken into 8 parts. The new adventure starts with the track "Music", a beautiful symphonic and cinematic intro in itself that lasts about 3 minutes gets the song started slowly. The build up continues as Floor Jansen enters which culminates with a bombastic and catchy chorus. It's a powerful progressively heavy start. But the best is yet to come, the single "Noise" maintain the bombastic catchiness but dial up in aggressiveness and heaviness. Guitarist Emppu Vuorinen leaves his metallic mark with some very cool guitar riffs and chugging which create a fascinating contrast with the symphonic arrangements. I also love the aggressive guitars on "Pan", another heavy song on the album. "How's the Heart?" brings the mid-tempo and the more pop side of the band. It's still a very good song, Tuomas knows how to write catchy tracks.
But HUMAN. :II: NATURE. is not just another Nightwish album, they were able to take their past elements and maintain a characteristic sound but also move beyond to add new elements and surprises. Tuomas found a balance between composing those huge symphonic arrangements without getting us overwhelmed by them. He also crafted different songs tailored to the different singers. "Harvest", which reminds me a lot of Kansas, is certainly a different track that adds to the versatility of the album. Floor only sings backing vocals and Troy Donockley is the lead singer on this folky inspired track. There are some stunning strings arrangements nicely mixed with Troy's Uilleann pipers. "Endlessness" which closes CD1 nicely provides a progressive melancholic track in just seven minutes. Here we finally get bassist Marko Hietala to share his distinctive pipes with us. With that said, when it comes to the vocals, frontwoman Floor Jansen absolutely shines like the star she is. Her versatility is again impressive, from the operatic ending of the huge "Shoemaker" to the metal drive on "Tribal" she has it all and anything else in between. Finally, we cannot talk about this album and not mention Kai Hahto, who has been playing with Nightwish since the summer of 2014, but only became a permanent band member in mid-2019. He brought some new blood and enthusiasm to this album. The drumming is great, not only the musicianship but also the production, they sound big throughout the album but specially on "Procession" and "Tribal".
We also have 30 minutes of music on CD2. Now here is the tricky part. I see it more like a bonus disc, it's basically a movie score and it sounds beautiful. But still I have to penalize the album for it because I know that most of the times I will listen to the first disc only.
In sum, symphonic metal with female vocals can be a bit of a cliche and by far not my favorite metal genre, but Nightwish with the current lineup has reached a complete new level of music writing, arrangement, musicianship and delivery. This is an amazing record for any metal fan, old and new, there's a bit of everything in HUMAN. :II: NATURE and it's a serious contender to album of the year. Thanks Tuomas and band for such an entertaining album in days like these.
On a side note, on an earlier post I discussed how the COVID-19 crisis is changing the music industry. Nightwish has released all songs as lyric videos and also made the album booklet available for download. I thought those were pretty cool initiatives.
SCORE: 87/100
Genre: Symphonic Metal
Released by Nuclear Blast Records on April 10th, 2020
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Rating System
96 - 100 Perfect
88 - 95 Excellent
84 - 87 Great
80 - 83 Very Good
75 - 79 Good
69 - 74 Mixed
58 - 68 Bad
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