I have fallen head over heels in love with Moonsorrow's latest album, released earlier this year. I can't put in to words what an achievement
Varjoina Kuljemme Kuolleiden Maassa is.
Like their other work, this is a concept album; the premise is a group of wanderers lost in the cold of forests and mountains -- their people have become extinct, and, these wanderers are also to die.
The album has just four songs, each being over 11 minutes in length, and, the space between each track is a cinematic transition where you hear footsteps, breathing and coughing of the wanderers trudging through the ice and snow as they try and search for hope. The group gets smaller and smaller, as can be told by the sparseness of the footsteps in each transition piece. At the end, the narrator is left alone and lays down by a river to succumb to his fate:
Thoughts flow with water
So warm is the hazy air
The sun is far hidden from the eye
In my bloody fist I close the Earth
I free myself from everything
It has been a very, very long time since I heard such ethereal, majestic, symphonically-epic and incredibly emotional compositions of music. The Finnish lyrics not only convey fear, desperation and loss, but, also the hope and beauty that presents itself in loneliness and solitude. The music reinforces these emotional states without a flaw.
An example track:
http://youtu.be/Eb1w8ln2yJk
In a cinematic context, Huuto is the pensive and spiritual part of the wanderer’s own journey through his mind -- a journey of finding himself.
12:53 onwards til the end of the song highlights some pretty beautiful emotional resonance.
Warning: short attention spans and narrowminds need not apply.
If you have 16 minutes, an open mind and don't mind hearing complex, beautiful, and uplifting music, put on a pair of headphones, close your eyes, and, give it a whirl.
H
It seemed to struggle with network errors trying to get info from the internet. I'll try it again when I get settled in Sydney. (I cannot leave my favourite melb radio stations behind 
)
