Review: Time I, or How I Came to Enjoy a CD with Death Growls

I don't really consider myself a metalhead and am by no means well-versed in any of the apparent 200 or so extant subgenres of heavy metal these days. So perhaps trying to write this review is not the greatest idea I've ever had. (Not having great ideas tends to be a recurring theme.) We'll see.

Thanks to the wonder that is YouTube, I'd been poking around and listening to various symphonic power metal: my interested had been piqued by stuff that sounds vaguely like somewhat edgier and at times drawn-out video game music. My musical background is heavy on what is generally termed "classical" music, but I also grew up during Square's SNES heyday, which still informs a good portion of my musical taste to this day

I still am figuring out what precisely I like and don't like within symphonic power metal, but along the way, I found Wintersun's Time I, which I've listened to about 25 times in the last few days or so. As I discovered after the fact, Time I had a notoriously long and protracted development history. Bear in mind as you read this review that I've been exposed to none of that or the associated hype, nor to Wintersun's eponymous first album.


CD layout
Having been split into two releases to expedite the release of some material (there will be a Time II), Time I is a short CD, only about 40 minutes of non-bonus-track music. The length doesn't really bother me, for reasons that I'll try to make clear shortly.

There are five nominal tracks of music variously described as some combination of extreme symphonic power metal, melodic death metal, and folk metal. However, there is only one actual pause in the sound, so you really have two sections of 17:38 and 22:29, in that order. For convenience, I'll call these Part I and II.

Part I
Part I opens with "When Time Fades Away", a texturally rich and cinematic instrumental influenced by Japanese folk music. It feels like it's in a very moderate 6/8 or possibly 3/4, depending on how you want to partition the beats; the same is true for much of Part I, actually. The best way I can think of to describe this track is Braveheart theme meets end credits to Far and Away meets "Time's Scar" from Chrono Cross, except perhaps even more simultaneously pensive and yet expansive than any of them, but that's not quite doing the track justice. There's a climax at 3:10 that lifts the mood noticeably, but then it calms down and segues into the next track.

"Sons of Winter and Stars" comprises the remainder of Part I, and is itself divided into four parts. Electric guitars herald the transition away from the material of "When Time Fades Away". The big entrance of full symphonic virtual instruments and backing choirs at 0:46 is quite possibly the most pleasantly jarring orchestral downbeat I've heard outside a movie theater. The electric guitars play some fast riffs above what is still fundamentally a moderate triple/compound meter.

And then, at 1:29 begin the growling vocals, which are usually something I don't care. But the orchestral stuff going on is interesting enough to keep me listening. Eventually this culminates in a  climax of: "Sons of winter and stars: RISE!", the last word punctuated by the weight of the backing chorus and orchestra.

The second part breaks up the relatively straightforward triple/compound rhythms and mixes in a bit of clean vocals before returning to growls and then back to clean vocals for the section climax. We get a cadence and, more than 11 minutes into Part I, it feels like the song should be ending.

But it doesn't, and we continue immediately into a relatively short ballad. We're definitely in 6/8 here; the beat is somewhat faster here but still relatively moderate. The clean vocals are excellent. Suddenly, the ballad ends, and we are thrust into the fourth section of the track by more growls announcing the refrain of a march-like anthem, still in 6/8. The backing chorus and orchestra reveal that the melody of the refrain is quite simple; it almost feels like a drinking song. But soon enough there is some dialogue between the orchestra and guitars. Growling and clean lead vocals alternate in this section, but the refrain is by far the most straightforward music on the CD.

Clocking in at about five and a half minutes, this section is long enough to be a track in and of itself anywhere else, but it's obvious that its relatively straightforward structure is meant as a finale to the preceding material.

All in all Part I is quite the auditory experience. I went through the trouble of describing it in detail to give an idea of the contrast in what it presents over the course of 17+ minutes, but I didn't do the textural complexity any justice. It's very full a good part of the time and yet tends to be sufficiently clear. In my opinion the one mixing weakness is that, at a couple points, the bass vocal countermelody, singing different (and important!) lyrics, is difficult to discern.

There's a lot of stuff going on, and yet it seems compositionally coherent and technically well-mixed -- well, at least by what I liked to hear. I'm sure there are those who would want more guitar and/or drums prominence, but the downplaying of these instruments was part of what really made this section feel different. One of the things that I tend not to like about pure power metal is that the focus tends to be on extremely fast guitars and drums, which gets tiring to listen to.

Part II and overall thoughts
Part II is not as explicitly structured as Part I, and it's a little more subtly complex, in that it doesn't try to throw loud, massive polyphony as consistently, but it's a pretty coherent 22 minutes of music. I'm not going to spend time chronicling it in depth, because this review is already much longer than it needs to be.

So, as I mentioned several hundred rambling words ago, I'm not too well-versed in metal, but I do know that there are some quite long tracks out there. But I don't think I've yet come across a CD that's essentially a 17.5-minute piece followed by another 22.5-minute piece. The other thing is, the orchestra and backing chorus feel much more omnipresent than anything else I've heard that wasn't a film or video game score.

To me, Time I feels less like five tracks, or even 2-3 "songs" (depending on how you count), and more like two symphonic poems informed by the conventions of heavy metal. I'm quite aware that there are some longer pieces in heavy metal, but the combination of long multi-part symphonic power metal pieces with the orchestra and chorus as prominent as they are, with both clean and growling vocals, and with a high level of contrapuntal complexity, is quite unlike anything else I've ever heard.

Certainly, the sound won't be everyone's cup of tea; I'm kind of surprised that it's mine, because it took me a couple of listens to get over the fact that there's growling in a piece that I want to listen to. But in the end, Part I has to be one of my favorite non-video-game pieces of music written in the last 90 years or so.

I don't know how Time II will stack up, or even whether they'll manage to meet their projected 2014 release date, but I'm definitely interested. They did mention that Time II will be overall faster, which worries me a little, since part of the appeal of Time I is that it never really rises above a moderately fast tempo. One thing that I've discovered is that I tend to like more moderately paced metal, where there isn't an overload of fast guitar and drum notes. But I do expect that Time II will still be compositionally complex and attempt to straddle a few different metal subgenres, so I'll be checking it out.