The Last Candle

I don’t expect a lot out of power metal, but I love it: fleet-fingered technical proficiency, the requisite guitar-keyboard dueling, soaring high-register vocals, swords-and-sorcery concepts, juvenile lyrics, and enough hooks and melodies for a half-dozen pop songs. Power metal is not interesting, but it is completely awesome.

Once in a while a power metal band grows a brain and changes the time signature for a few bars, dumps the keyboard for a glockenspiel, drops the frenetic double-bass drumming or guitar solos for long atmospheric bridges and 10-minute compositions, or cans the unicorn fantasies to delve into concepts about society, politics or theories of existentialism. This is called going prog, and the change is generally a beautiful thing.

But sometimes the change doesn’t work out so well. Take the following two clips from a band I’ve followed and enjoyed for nearly ten years, Sonata Arctica. Sonata Arctica’s second album, Silence (2001), contained a song called Wolf & Raven that has not only been a personal favorite since then but is an excellent example of the genre as a whole.

So I was excited to find recently that a 2008 re-release of Silence featured a “remake” of Wolf & Raven. Excellent. Going into the song, I expected them to have tightened up the sound, punched up the concept through orchestral and more complex arrangements, and expanded the song while keeping the same frenetic energy of the original track.

See for yourself — here’s a clip of the Wolf & Raven remake. I’m playing the 2008 version first because it’s, well, the underwhelming of the two versions. Both versions use the same lyrics stanzas to make the difference more clear, although the change couldn’t be more obvious as-is.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Melodic and swooning, which is 50% of the power metal world. But this low-tempo ballad is also unusually pompous and forsakes none of the standard drumming, guitar or keyboard melodies of any kind, as if the remake was just a resume for Tony Kakko, the band’s lead singer, songwriter and part-time keyboardist. It has no lift, no energy.

The “remake” part could have been been “demo” and that would’ve made a lot more sense, especially after exhibiting this next clip of the 2001 original. Turn your speakers up (or down, if you’re not so much into the metal thing).

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Now that’s what I call power metal: fast, fiery, and totally ridiculous. The 2008 remake is has little power and certainly isn’t metal, so I don’t know what it is. Dramatic, definitely. Foppish, maybe. But it isn’t metal, although it’s still not bad. At least the band kept the high-register vocals and orchestral arrangements.

Sonata Arctica released a new album just a couple weeks ago, with Flag in the Ground being the new single. I’ve given it some playtime: solid album, but a new Porcupine Tree album was released a week prior to Arctica’s The Days of Grays. And the Tree cannot be out-progged.