Album Retrospective: Winterheart's Guild

now playing: No Doubt - Spiderwebs

Now we're getting into the classic stuff. Released in 2003, Winterheart's Guild is a strange sort of album. This is not because nearly half the album is ballads, or because at ten tracks, it's one of Sonata Arctica's shortest albums to date. No, this is largely because Zelian Games has taken the title of the album and indeed many of the concepts therein and, with the blessing of the band, begun creating a video game. Winterheart's Guild looks promising, though at the moment it seems to be in development hell, as it were. Which is unfortunate, as the game is rumored to include at least one unreleased song from Sonata Arctica. Still, I have faith in Zelian Games, and perhaps when the technology arises to beam video games directly into our cerebral cortex, we'll be able to play Winterheart's Guild as we listen to Sonata's 15th or 20th studio album.

A man can dream.

Enough about the video game, though; let's get to the album. Winterheart's Guild is more keyboard-driven than the band's earlier two albums. This predicts a change in direction that would become more prominent on Unia, but when I first heard this album, I was a little confused. Up until Reckoning Night, the keyboard player in Sonata Arctica was a little like the drummer in Spinal Tap, only without the death. Their earlier demos and Ecliptica featured jack of all trades Tony Kakko on keyboards, while Silence had ex-Kenziner keyboardist Mikko Härkin. Winterheart's Guild has, if I may, four bitchin' keyboard solos that Kakko may not have been able to play on his own. So who better to play them than ex-Dio, ex-Rising Force, current Stratovarius keyboardist Jens Johansson? I can only imagine what a great moment this must have been for Sonata, whose earlier albums drew much of their inspiration from Stratovarius.

That inevitable rush of emotion transfers immediately into the album, which features high-energy staples like "Victoria's Secret" and "The Cage" (the wolf song and the perpetual big finish in live shows) interspersed with stark piano ballads like "The Misery" and "Draw Me". "Gravenimage", the second track and a personal favorite, ups the ante, starting out as a ballad and turning into an intense guitar-fest at the halfway mark. In the oft-overlooked "Champagne Bath", keyboards turn to marimbas during the bridge in a finger-breaking triple meter that really speaks to Johansson's virtuosity. All the while, drummer Tommy Portimo blasts out the double bass in eighth note triplets, Kakko brings the soaring vocals, and Jani Liimatainen uses just the right amount of guitar effects to keep everything interesting and tied together. There's even room for a few bars of solo from bassist Marko Paasikoski. I don't really understand why this song goes unappreciated more often than not, as it's a great example of the band as one unit at their best.

I wish I could say the same for some of the other songs. Despite Johansson's guest work, Winterheart's Guild has been my least favorite Sonata album for a while. "Broken", the second single, has become a main fixture at concerts, but for me, it treads the line between power ballad and power metal too carefully, never straying even a millimeter to one side or the other. I will say that the line "heaven's closed / hell's sold out / so I walk on earth" is one of the better things Kakko has written, but it's barely enough to make the song interesting. In contrast, "Silver Tongue" has excellent instrumentation, but I'm put off almost entirely by Kakko's poor diction and downright befuddling word choice ("call me Ishmael if it ain't a lie", for one). I'm not sure if this album is meant to be transitional material or not, but I can say I'm glad that the band has taken most of the good songs with them and left the rest to freeze to death. B-