Amorphis - Far From The Sun
Virgin
Heavy Metal
10 songs (43'48)
Release year: 2003
Amorphis, Virgin
Reviewed by Jack

It's been a long time since Amorphis and I have parted ways. It's not that I don't like their music, in fact, I just don't really care about their music anymore, because after releasing such an album as Tales From The Thousand Lakes, you can't simply turn your back on death metal and release stuff such as Elegy, Tuonela and Am Universum claiming it's still heavy metal.

Just like Paradise Lost after Gothic, Amorphis changed their musical orientation after their strongest album Tales From The Thousand Lakes, but contrary to Paradise Lost, Amorphis never released an Icon or a Draconian Times after their musical turn. To me, and after quite some listens, Far From The Sun is an album just like its predecessors, far, far away from what the band did best a decade ago. It's another album that is easy listening to but unfortunately rather uninspired and insipid. I bet the purpose of such an album is to climb the Finnish charts, generate money and make their new major label, Virgin, happy selling tons and tons of records.

What does remain after all ? A couple of good tunes such as opening track Days Of Your Beliefs and Killing Goodness where the band remembers that metal is to be played with a guitar. Except for that, there's a bunch of mellow non metal tracks such as... well I won't name all of them anyway. Gosh it hurts to listen to such uninspired metal when you know the potential of this band. I mean Elegy was quite a good metal album because there was some great metal stuff left, but after that came nothingness.

This new album surely will please those who call themselves open-minded listeners and they will probably shoot me down in flames, but I don't care since this isn't metal anymore. Paradise Lost also had their pop metal years, but fortunately they came back with a strong metal album of today. Hopefully so will these Finnish guys.

 

Killing Songs :
Days Of Your Beliefs, Killing Goodness
Jack quoted 60 / 100
Other albums by Amorphis that we have reviewed:
Amorphis - Circle reviewed by Khelek and quoted 90 / 100
Amorphis - The Beginning Of Times reviewed by Khelek and quoted 90 / 100
Amorphis - Tuonela reviewed by Khelek and quoted 89 / 100
Amorphis - Skyforger reviewed by Khelek and quoted 95 / 100
Amorphis - Silent Waters reviewed by Alex and quoted 88 / 100
To see all 8 reviews click here
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