The first three albums only get sporadic play from me. I just find Tarja isn't diverse enough to capture my interest for very long. There are a couple of standout tracks, but by-and-large, I don't go to them very often. Might have to give them a spin today just to see.
I somewhat feel that way about
Oceanborn. I like a lot of the songs, but there's very little diversity on the album which makes it somewhat less interesting on the whole.
Angels Fall First is more diverse which can make it more interesting, but it falls below
Oceanborn for me because the songwriting is significantly weaker on
Angels.
Wishmaster, to me, has the strongest songwriting of the three despite a few weaker songs (Wanderlust and Crownless, to me, but
Oceanborn has Sacrament of Wilderness which is just as forgettable and doesn't have anything at the level of Dead Boy's Poem or FantasMic).
To me there's no question that the band stepped it up on
Century Child and has maintained a good combination of strong songwriting and diversity ever since (
Dark Passion Play was a dip in songwriting quality but not by too much, plus it has some truly excellent tracks—namely the memorable bookends to the album that are The Poet and the Pendulum and Meadows of Heaven).
Imaginaerum was a new height in this regard, in my opinion, as it has a lot of songs that are well outside the norm for Nightwish (could anyone have seen Slow, Love, Slow coming?), and the songs that were more conventional were stellar (Storytime).
However, I still think the pre-
Century Child era is still very good and quite worth investigation—and I don't even like power metal. Songs like Angels Fall First, Stargazers, Gethsemane, Swanheart, Walking in the Air (yeah it's a cover, but still), Sleeping Sun, She Is My Sin, Wishmaster, Dead Boy's Poem or FantasMic alone would propel any band who had them in their discography to "noteworthy" status, and just the very existence of
Century Child and Ghost Love Score, to say nothing of a lot of other really great material, on top of that is easily enough to make Nightwish great.
the documentary I watched was titled "Please Learn the Setlist in 48 hours". It's 2 hours in Finnish, but was very interesting. Starts of with the firing of Annette, then follows them for the remainder of the tour, up to the filming at Wacken.
That's the one that's in the DVD. I think I may have gotten bored during the "follows them for the remainder of the tour part" and shut it off before getting to the Wacken part. But the first part, from the beginning to Floor's first performance with the band, was very interesting.
-End of an Era is spectacular. You would hardly guess that both Tarja and Marco were so under the weather.
And you'd hardly guess that the guys had already 'fired' Tarja, just hadn't told her. Although, Tuomas has a certain look in his eyes a few times that you can tell exactly that he's thinking 'you're gonna get yours after the show'.
One could speculate that this is also why he cries during the intro to Ever Dream.
Topic: Nightwish... (Read 317121 times)
