Metal Reviews

NO

Jar Jar Binks should be erased from the annals of history.

I personally loved it ! The new songs sounded better because of the orchestrations in the back, it gave the overall sound a more powerful feel, but the old songs where great too, Beyond the Dark Sun, Winter Madness, Death and the Healing and finishing the show with Starchild. It was epic !

A little surprised earing Jari asking people to support the band by purchasing goods on the marketing stand. Not that I mind and YES, we need to support our artists or they will no longer create the music we love. Just not used earing at least it twice in one concert. Bought (before concert started) 3 T-shirts (1 for me, 1 for my wife and 1 for a friend), and a signed copy of the digipak edition of the disk (that one my brother Danny offrered to me, including the tickets for the show, thanks a lot bro !). So all in all 130$ worth of marketing goods, for just one guy (and my bro dropped another 100$ in T-shirt and LP) I guess it's supporting the band we love ... he he. It had been since Wacken 2008 I didn't buy a new shirt so I'm glad I did. Glad they had XXL sizes cause my figures have growns over the years (even though it doesn't show on that great avatar pic my wife took of me) ... trying to melt it down a little but since I don't do sports anymore it's gonna be tough.

Anyway, great concert, some little issues with voices level in the first song, but better after that. Varg was ok but can't stand the vocals (loved the ultra melodic riffs though), Korpiklanni was ok but I find it quickly boring (accordion should not exist as an instrument, period !). Violin parts were somewhat fun. Didn't hear Trollfest (we were having dinner instead ).

They are both good, they're just VERY different, one is borderline melodeath (more power metal inspired music), the S/T, this is another beast alltogether and I understand why melodeath only fans won't like it as much, but for those who like both melodeath and Power Metal, and love Hollywood scores, this is an absolute killer album.

As for my brother, it's Danny, he reviewed tons of albums over the years, as he is the other co-creator, in fact without him there would be no site. He decided how the reviews would look, what fields each would have, the quoting system... pretty much everything (and he is a freaking walking and talking metal encyclopedia !). I was the techie brother making it happen in terms of technology at first. Also the first year we were almost alone in the reviewer roaster, I think by the end of 2000 or 2001 we started hiring reviewers (we did have a few local ones, friends and stuff, like Marc, Paul, Sin, Jack,... but they didn't stay that long). Marc however did the entire coding of of the custom CMS system we used since September 2000 (I was basically writing loads of HTML by hand before that, so his code was a mega life saver and to this day the CORE of the revews database is still his original code), and even migrated all the old reviews (static html) into the new database system he had created ! I cannot thank him enough, I would have stopped doing this after a couple of years (or simply learned and found another system to make it work but hopefully I didn't have to).

So there you are, my brother and I created the website, it was a few months after we went to Wacken 1999 (10th anniversary) and had the TIME OF OUR LIVES ! I will never ever forget this, my first openair festival, an amazing experience. During a Xmas meal with the family I dropped the line "but we could also have a website" to the table while my brother and I were discussing some other page, and he said "please don't toy with me". I said I wasn't, the week after he came to my place, we reserved metalreviews.com domain name (I was utterly surprised it was available) and in January 2000 we had the first reviews (they were more snippets back then, as we were trying to cover at least 30 albums a month being only 2 and with me having to write the code for the site on top of things) up and running, we ran a monthly update at first, then we switched to weekly once the new system was in place (or maybe even before that I can't remember every little detail ). The rest is history... to this day there are 7919 (maybe a few less cause this is an ID number, and we removed all of a reviewer that shalt not be named) reviews in the database, not bad huh ? That's almost two reviews per day on average since the site's existence.

I'm suddently feeling a little bit of pride. Of course this is not my doing, we created the site, Danny can no longer review (I feel he wishes he could), but without the countless reviewers effort, time and dedication, both past, present and future, there would be no MetalReviews. I keep the lights in, but this is a HUGE team effort. Thanks to anyone involved over the years (and in the years to come).

Seconded. Nooooooooooooooo No no no noooooooooooo

However people hoping Time II will be different are just gonna be disullusioned, there is no way Jari is gonna change style for the second part. I HIGHLY suspect NB is behind the split of the album, therefore the rest will sound similar, BUT, maybe there will be stronger faster riff oeriented songs, but I wouldn't hold my breath.I don't personally care as I find Time I near perfect.

Thank you for going into so much detail and you should be proud. This is a great site. One day I will go to wacken. Right now I'm poor. Thanks again, I like to know who is who.

And I'm gonna check out the first album before checking out this one. I want to know what all the fuss is about this band.

Now I'm intrigued as to who the reviewer was that shall remain nameless.

You're welcome and thanks for your kind words.

I hope so. Jari can definitely make that.

This is the best album I have heard in a long time. It is amazing in a different way then the first album. My favorite track is the title track. The chorus is incredibly emotional lyrically and musically.

I can see how if someone just read the back of the album and saw 5 songs would feel a little misguided when there is really only 3. But the material is freakin strong. If you are more into the death metal or tech death side of Wintersun you may not be so taken with it. If you are into Nightwish, Rhapsody, Equilibrium, Turisas, or Ensiferum....this is better.

+1

You mean Jar Jar Stinks don't you.

Stinks is an understatement. He almost ruined The Phantom Menace for me. Fortunately there was Darth Maul to counterbalance the crap that was Binks

And Chris , i hope Time II will be more guitar oriented due to how The Way Of Fire sound (which i assume will be on Time II). Granted i only heard a shitty YouTube version of it but it seemed to be more in the mold of the S/T than the songs on Time I.

I really like this one even if I think the debut overtakes it for the sheer advantage of having more material. 85-89 stuff anyhow.

For those interested about Time II, I recently interviewed Jari for a local magazine and he said it would be fairly close to part I when it comes to the soundscape, massive orchestrations etc., still keeping up with the oriental elements & melodies-thing, a little different and more versatile when it comes to the atmosphere.

And as pertains to the splitting of the album, which has understandably caused murmuring even here on the board, Jari said that it was purely for the sake of finally getting material released. What had taken a massive chunk of this time between the debut album and now was the mixing of the monstrosity (as Jari alluded to it) that makes up the whole 80+ minute set of songs. Apparently he didn't have the budget to do mixings etc. in a pro studio and had to improvise as he went on with the gear in his living room.

So Time I is basically the amount of material they had absolutely finished in terms of mixing, mastering, the works, at this point. Jari said that the release date for part II is still open because he will still need to mix that one at some point in between Wintersun's current tours. How long and frequent those tours get will directly affect the duration for the rest of Time's material to get finished. To me, Jari speculated that he hopes the second part would come out late 2013 the latest but wouldn't be surprised if early 2014 is where it goes. Still the same living room-gear he'll have to mix it on, so he may have played safe with those estimates.

And so it begins...

Yes and no, Jari could only get ALL the tracks to work memory wise since 2011, he had to wait full 64bit support and huge amount of memory to be used in the program so he could work fully on it. I'm inclined to say it might be 2014 but he has the songs already. So late 2013 is stilla possibility.

So what begins? Complaining?

The delays obviously. I'm not necessarily complaining about it, nor am I pointing the finger towards Jari directly. It's just that last I knew Time II was coming spring next year and now it's already late 2013, maybe even early 2014. Again, I recognize that the causes for the potential delay are mostly out of his hands, but still.

Apart from his decision to work in 64 bit, you mean?

That's why I said mostly and not all.

That's fucking stupid of him too, you can always mix and render to bounce down tracks. In fact this is the way damn near every record is made. I say near every record because some records had so few tracks that there was room to spare using a 16-track machine way back when. All the guy did was admit he did not want to spend the time mixing and documenting what was done to the original tracks in an effort to mix everything at once instead so he could avoid having to mix anything multiple times until he got what he wanted.

Yes he could have done it this way, but it's no way fucking stupid, he wants the control to add / remove tracks, test, see if he likes, put aside... etc. I understand this way of working, I work EXACTLY the same on my Photoshop projects, I keep all layers, I can change details, effects and colors on all my images, they end up taking up to 1Gb of memory at one point (at a time where I could barely afford 4Gb of RAM), so my Photoshop was crawling (you need at least 3 times the amount of memory than the project or Photoshop will start swapping and come to a crawl). Now it's no longer an issue, in 64 bits with 16Gb of RAM, I could either collect my layers or simply go from 400 to 600 dpi images. Nevertheless, I just hate when I have to merge layers to free up memory. I like the option to go back and change the slightest detail, so I understand Jari.