But there are just way too damn many ingredients in this pot. I could cut three songs - 'Eva', 'Last of the Wilds', and 'Master Passion Greed', and swap 'Sahara' or 'For the Heart I Once Had' for 'The Escapist' - and the album would run a little more tightly. That means half of this album is not worth listening to for me. The lyrics, melody, and orchestrations are all gorgeous.īut oh my God, man. 'The Escapist' should be where 'Eva' is on the tracklist what was Tuomas thinking? It is one of the very best songs from this era and it's mystifying that it did not make the tracklist. Speaking of B-Sides, wow, does 'Dark Passion Play' have a good one. Actually, 'For the Heart I Once Had' is a pretty little song, too a bit underrated - but is the stuff of B-Sides. 'Meadows of Heaven' is actually quite beautiful and a poignant closer - Nightwish has always been good at closing albums properly. The last two tracks of the album, which together constitute 15 minutes of music, really wake things back up, though, with a chilling atmosphere opening '7 Days to the Wolves' that continues through Anette's verses, a dazzling instrumental bridge, and a finale of counterpoint that just about runs off the rails before resolving. Emppu lets out a lot of pent-up energy on this track: it keeps the album from falling apart on its way to the end run. That's not totally dead on this record but only this song really embodies it. Nightwish always took themselves a bit seriously but on earlier records there was more of a sense of fun. This album majorly loses momentum after the first four songs, finding its legs again only once before the penultimate track - that would be 'Whoever Brings the Night', one of the only songs on this album that is fun from beginning to end. It's not even close to being as brilliant as 'Beauty of the Beast' or 'Ghost Love Score', but it gets the job done in a way 'Song of Myself' and 'Greatest Show On Earth' do not. There are lots of highlights: the opening verses and refrain, Marco's entry to the end, with an emotional wallop of a closing section. Making 'The Poet and the Pendulum' the album opener was pretty audacious, and while the singing children have got to go, I think the song is still Nightwish's third-best 10 min+ piece. 'Amaranth' is at least as attention-grabbing as 'Nemo', 'Cadence of Her Last Breath' is a solid, chugging, Sonata-Arctica-Full-Moon-homage-giving track, and 'Bye Bye Beautiful' is at least catchy, which is more than you can say about Nightwish songs nowadays. It's still a serviceable, catchy, albeit bloated record there are worse albums that can be used as an ambassador to the uninitiated into the world of metal. But it's not quite as bad as some of the harsh retrospectives deem it, either. This album definitely isn't as great as 17-year-old me thought it was. Anyway, the second show of the DPP Tour was my first metal show, and I was just on a big freakin' high with this band back then. Frankly, coming off of 'Century Child' and 'Once' and with 'Oceanborn' under their belt, I had good reason to feel that way at the time, even though Tarja's absence was a major disappointment. OK, so: 17-year-old me had seldom looked forward to an album as much as I then looked forward to 'Dark Passion Play.' I was in love with the single 'Amaranth', which racked up well over 1,000 plays on my iPod I liked Anette basically as much as Tarja at the time, and I thought Nightwish could do no wrong and Tuomas was a god.
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