Band:	Wintersun
Album:	Time II
Style:	Extreme power metal
Release date:	August 30, 2024
A review by:	ScreamingSteelUS

01. Fields Of Snow
02. The Way Of The Fire
03. One With The Shadows
04. Ominous Clouds
05. Storm
06. Silver Leaves

Well, it’s about damn time.

If you have been living on an isolated Andamanese island all your life, there are a couple of things you might not be aware of. First, we've discovered penicillin. It's great. Second, Wintersun sucks. And I don't mean that in a bizarrely affectionate way, like how people say "Primus sucks" when they actually want to heap accolades on Col. Claypool's bassy banditos. I mean that I no longer wear my Wintersun t-shirt outside the house because I don't want people to think that I am an easily manipulated moron (I am, but that's why I have to take extra precautions). I mean that we are going to look this gift horse in the mouth and we're going to apply a mandibular microscope so powerful that it can actually detect the impossibly minute jots of respect that I still have for Jari Mäenpää.

There is no sense in pretending that Time II doesn't have some of the heaviest baggage that a metal album has ever been saddled with. I first became a Wintersun fan c. 2010 and people were already getting sick of jokes about how Time was taking forever (it was originally slated for a late-2006 release, mind, and as one album). If you've ever hovered near this circle of the metal sphere, you've picked up on the shroud of weariness hanging over Wintersun's stalwart fan base; we've sure nominated them for Drama of the Year enough times in the last two decades. Wintersun is no longer a band but a carnival.

Generally, I try to respect an artist's personal and creative needs. I respect Bolt Thrower's decision not to continue recording on the grounds that they couldn't meet their own standards (and who could top Those Once Loyal anyway?); I don't demand that Devin Townsend bring back Strapping Young Lad, foundational though those recordings are to me; as eager as I am for King Diamond to release his long-awaited return, currently sitting at 9 years since announcement, 17 since its predecessor, I'm not cursing his name for not delivering it yet; I can even understand Rotting Christ's decision not to release any new music since 2007 for some reason. But Green Carnation, Virgin Black, Toxik, Disillusion, Conception, Porcupine Tree, Heavy Load, and Heir Apparent weren't engaged in constant warfare during their lengthy absences. Warlord and Death Angel and Melt-Banana weren't teasing incomprehensible updates, shilling repackages of inadequate amounts of new music, begging for money, launching crowdfund after crowdfund, establishing Patreons of questionable value, antagonizing their record label, constructing entirely new workspaces, getting subsidized by their governments, building jacuzzis, or embracing the joke about jacuzzis and repeating it as if people weren't genuinely kind of pissed off that their money wasn't showing any returns after years and years. Hell, Sleep's comeback after 15 years was announced as a surprise the day before. All the fuss about Time isn't just fuss about time. It's the way Jari has managed his commercial enterprise. Frankly, the struggle to continue caring about this album is likely at a point for many people where it doesn't matter how good Time II actually is because the investment will overshadow the return. I myself have not reached that state of decay, but it would be understandable.

Now, I'd say we're still justified in whinging about the wait, given that this album was first announced 19 years ago and apparently has been under active construction for significant stretches since then. In those 19 years, Alice Cooper has released six albums, Magnum have released ten, Boris have released 29, Agathocles have done more splits than Jean-Claude Van Damme, and Buckethead has released at least one album dedicated to every individual atom in the universe. Sigh even beat Wintersun to releasing an album with over 100 tracks per song, which I noted in my review of Graveward back in 2015. We're not looking at a huge quantity/quality dichotomy here either.

I hope you'll pardon the excess of information you're already aware of - this will be the last occasion on which we'll ever be able to complain about Time’s delay in the present tense, so I have to get it all out here, partly for my own catharsis and partly for posterity's sake. There will come a point in the future when all of this context fades away and Jari's schemes wither in fragments of time. For fans who have only just discovered Wintersun or are yet to discover them, this doesn't matter at all, and my lengthy diatribe will seem foolish. That is why, after spending the length of an entire review saying nothing whatsoever about the essence of Time II as an album, I will finally get to the music.

This is exactly what it says on the packaging: it’s Time part two, an epic of lengthy, progressive compositions that spin massive symphonies around dramatic melodeath concepts. The melodies dance between folk and classical, sometimes swelling into the affirmative majesty of power metal, sometimes puzzling over an Asiatic wrinkle. The crackling, forceful speed-riffs and pummeling drums that make Finnish extreme power metal what it is are well in evidence, as are multiple Jaris raising exultant chorus in harmony. Coy, thoughtful, and bombastic all in turn, the melodies support gigantic hooks and thunder, but they have a certain fragility to them: if this album like its predecessors paints its native landscape with sound, you can hear the flowers as well as the mountains. Helping that along is what I’m going to call a synth erhu, which did appear on Time I but serves as a more prominent component here, particularly on “Fields Of Snow” and “Silver Leaves”.

One of the less infuriating developments leading up to this album was Jari’s decision to retire from guitar to focus on vocals while performing live, and while that decision precedes this release by quite a bit, it makes sense when listening to the guitar arrangements; I suspect that they may have to hire yet one more additional guitarist to pull off some of these parts live. Jari’s guitar skill has long been evident – as a soloist, as a riffwriter, as a shredder, as a composer – but I feel as though I’m learning his facility for the first time again. The guitars have more lead time here than on past albums, and while there’s no great departure from Time I (the instrumental portions of the title track are an apparent forerunner), the precision, tone, and ingenuity are so flawless here that I would dub this the best batch of work from Wintersun’s guitarists. Riff-wise, you’ll never beat stuff like “Beyond The Dark Sun” or “Death And The Healing”, but we are now in the realm of full-fledged orchestration. I shouldn’t fail to credit Teemu Mäntysaari as well; I have no specific information as to who recorded what, and while I’m inclined to assume that much of what we hear is Jari simply because of the nature of this project and this album, I’ll give them equal credit for having created a fantastic piece of work.

What we know for sure belongs to Jari is the songwriting, and the extensive instrumental passages remind me of his professed love for film score – you can feel the movements of many musical ideas throughout and a capacity for feeling that creates a kind of narrative symphony. If Jari were to compose the score for a film, I suspect the results would be successful, although he’d better start now if he wants to be done in time for the 37th Indiana Jones movie. Nothing on this album strikes me quite as mightily and builds with such consistent memorability as “Sons Of Winter And Stars”, which is my favorite Wintersun song, but the emotional richness found on “Land Of Snow And Sorrow” and “Time” flourishes here, particularly on “Silver Leaves”, and there is another triumphant epic in “The Way Of The Fire”. After a couple of weeks with Time II, I feel that it is the inferior half, but the difference is slight, and possibly due to the 12 years of bias I have toward the first half – this is an excellently crafted and performed piece of music in every moment, and were there not 19 years of pressure I’d say that not a single Wintersun fan should be disappointed.

Among the many risks that Jari took in keeping this album in the vault for so long was the possibility that Wintersun might become irrelevant. Their first album is what I would call the greatest-ever example of the classic Finnish fusion of melodeath, power, and folk, a sound so distinctive and vital to modern metal that it ought to enjoy protected-designation-of-origin status; Time I built on that exceedingly well with the additional weight of its symphonic and progressive elements. These styles have proliferated immensely over the years, or at least the former variety – they’re beautiful, they’re sensational, and they sell. And when you’re asleep at the wheel for so long, you have to expect that some of your own progeny will sneak up and change the cards. We might have gotten this far and found that nobody needed another helping.

But listening to Time II a whole 12 years after Time I, those apprehensions are whisked away with the wind: the Wintersymphony is inimitably dense and complex. The depth of the sound – the spitfire melodies, the veritable forests of orchestration, the interplay of instrument upon voice upon instrument – is so unlike anything that Wintersun’s contemporaries are attempting. For similar songwriting and stylistic blends, there are easy comparisons: Ensiferum, Brymir, Kalmah, Xanthochroid, Whispered, etc. But when it comes to the sheer depth of this sound, when I’m judging the complexity and thoroughness of all those layers, I’m drawn first and foremost to Rhapsody, whose collaborations with actual orchestras and dominant classical grounding gave their landmark albums a similarly cinematic personality. I hate to say it because it credits the necessity of the time expenditure, but Wintersun more than any other contender possesses voluminous vivacity: this sounds like the tremendous effort that it is, and the result is a rare grandeur.

At the end of this album, I feel an odd mixture of victory and defeat. When Wintersun delivers, it delivers like it’s gutting a goose for hors d’oeuvres in the back of a speeding pizza wagon. They just need to deliver more than once a decade (I don’t consider The Forest Seasons to have done so). I do love Wintersun on a musical level, and I have been successful so far in keeping my long-fermenting frustration with the circumstances from poisoning my experience with Time II itself; my honest assessment is that this album is amazing and I have to admit that I felt a spark of rare disbelieving joy when the promo actually showed up in my inbox unexpectedly. At the same time, I don’t want to forget that I am sick of Wintersun’s bullshit, and I’m not going to argue with any fan who won’t give this album a second thought; Jari’s antics have soured me on his eccentric artist shtick and I’ve come to view his PR tactics as rather more exploitative and arrogant than enamoring. The ends are not going to justify the means for everybody out there. But ultimately that’s a journey for each fan to embark on individually; I’ve told you about the album, and that’s all I can do. Wintersun, you’ve succeeded. Now never, ever do this again.