Review: Wintersun – Time II

August 29, 2024

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It’s about goddamn time ayyyyyyyyyy.

Let me get this out of the way now: I don’t plan on making any fuss about the multiple crowdfunding campaigns over the past few years or their perceived value to backers. There have already been plenty of pieces on that already, plenty of sauna jokes bandied about, and so on. By all means, feel free to get into it in the comments if you so choose, but I would like to engage with and review this album in good faith. I’m going to leave any biases spawned from the nonsense surrounding the band at the door and just look at the music on its own merits.

With that out of the way, let’s get to the fun part. This has been a long time coming- damn near 20 years, in fact, having originally been announced as a single album entitled Time (no numerical additives) back in 2006. For all the hoopla around the album’s production in the latter half of those 18 years, the band really was put through the ringer making this record. Hardware failures, day jobs, health issues writer’s block, and total file loss of its recordings are all problems that plagued the band’s progress those first few years. It eventually expanded in scope, with Time I releasing in late 2012. I have now spent just short of a third of my life waiting for this album to come out.

Jesus Christ.

But that’s all in the past, and against all expectations, Time II is finally here. True to Jari’s word, Time II picks up right where its predecessor left off, gulf in releases be damned. Depending on how you look at it, this means it’s either a grand and sweeping piece of extreme power metal that strikes you to your emotional core or it’s bloated, over-produced garbage that falls flat in its attempts to be cinematic. Regardless of your views, it’s stylistically identical to its predecessor, bombastic and over-the-top in both production and composition.

Behold, the Time Sausage

I can already hear some Wintersun self-titled stalwarts groaning at the prospect of straining their ears trying to hear the guitars and bass through a cacophony of synths and choirs, but trust me here; this album is much better mixed within the same general framework as Time I. Where the band was buried under a dozen layers of orchestrations before, they are now rightfully front and center of the mix. The production elements still take the forefront here and there to carry an important melody or accent certain passages, but they’re largely used for ornamentation and texture this time around. The guitars are the real stars of the show here, and I was very happy hearing the bass consistently cutting through the mix in a significant way for probably the first time across Wintersun’s whole discography. It may be just shy of brickwalled, but this is inarguably the best the band has sounded since the debut.

And boy am I glad that the actual band is really audible again, because they went all-out on this album. Much ado was made of Jari’s brief stint as a full-time vocalist during Asim’s tenure in the band, and he is a fairly strong singer, but his real talent has always lain on the fretboard. “The Way of the Fire,” the first full track after an intro and a staple of their live set for around a decade now, explodes open in a whirlwind of blastbeats underscoring a triumphant tremolo-picked melody. The bulk of this song’s riffs are fast and punchy, calling to mind the best of early Ensiferum and the debut album, and it never holds on one idea too long. Guitar porn addicts will find a lot to love here in particular- the solos are numerous, excessive, and immaculate. For as indulgent as this shredding is, it’s got direction and flow, a narrative within the greater arc of the song.

“One with the Shadows” is a much more restrained follow up, a sort of “Death and the Healing” by way of “Sadness and Hate” vibe. It’s the weakest song on the album in my opinion; it’s not bad by any stretch, but it doesn’t quite match the energy or emotional heft of the rest of the record. “Ominous Clouds” follows this up with a clean guitar solo interlude into the absolute heater that is “Storm,” which I can say definitively is my new favorite Wintersun song. A slow build into a tense and furious riff instantly conjures vivid images of the song’s namesake, the vocals surging with a melodramatic theatrical flair matching with a touch of neoclassical melody throughout. There are shades of “Beyond the Dark Sun” and “Starchild” in the strings, and it all comes together in what I feel is a more effective version of what the band was going for in “Autumn” from The Forest Seasons. If “The Way of the Fire” represents the best of Wintersun’s power metal leanings, then “Storm” is its melodeath counterpart.

Closing it all out is “Silver Leaves,” a mammoth 13-minute track that is about the closest thing on this album to a ballad. This song leans fully into the band’s Japanese music influence; I don’t personally know enough about Japanese music theory to correctly identify whichever mode it is, but you’ll definitely get it when you hear it. If you don’t, then the erhu and koto accompanying the gentle sway of this surprisingly bittersweet tune will certainly give it away. It also strikes me as uncharacteristically introspective, seemingly pondering the time it takes to create music and the struggle of translating one’s ideas to reality. Maybe I’m just reading too much into it, I don’t know. In any case, I like the choice of slowing things down for the closer, and it ends up wrapping up the Time saga in a neat little bow.

I normally try to avoid these track-by-track examinations of an album, but it couldn’t be helped here. These songs aren’t just long: they’re dense as hell, with an absurd number of tracks per tune and little one-off touches that must have made this thing a nightmare to engineer. Whether or not it should have actually been a twelve-year job is up for debate, but I’m not going to try to get into that here. Everything surrounding this album- the wait, the money, the side projects and lineup change, whether Wintersun is even relevant in the metal landscape anymore- is all discussion for another piece entirely. For now, I’ll leave you with this: if you liked Time I, you will love Time II. If you enjoy other bands in or adjacent to this style such as Atavistia, Whispered, Brymir, or hell, even Tyr, you’ll want to check this out. Otherwise, your mileage may vary. I doubt this album will convert any nonbelievers, and who were hoping for a return to the more down-to-earth style of the debut will likely be disappointed. I am not one of those people, however, and I have thoroughly enjoyed the numerous spins I’ve given the record.